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Me and Andy 










ME AND ANDY 

A Boy and Dog Story 


By RAYMOND KELLY 

\\ 

Illustrated by 

ELECTRA PAPADOPOULOS 

Color plates by 
LILLIAN B. WUERFEL 


JUNIOR PRESS BOOKS 

ALBERTW'HITMAN 

L" 4C0 
CHICAGO 

1938 




ten 
- K*/\n 

Me 


Copyright 1938 

By Albert Whitman & Co. 

Copyright 1928 By Laidlaw Brothers 



Printed in U.S.A. 

£>ClA 1 23 327 


OCT 1? 1838 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Colored Plates 


FACING PAGE 

Me and Andy.Frontispiece 

You Don’t Have to Catch Fish to Enjoy 

Fishing . 52 

She Sat Rocking and Laughing at Me 

While I Was Doing My Washing. 84 

Andy Was Standing Squarely Over Him- 116 

Andy Sat in the Bow, Looking Out Over the 

Water . 132 

I Said, “I Wouldn’t Think of Charging for 
a Charity Job”. 148 

Illustrations in Text 

page 

I Thought Maybe a Drink of Water Might 
Help . 12 

I Went Right Off to Sleep. *... 30 

I Agreed to Saw Wood for My Dinner. 69 

I Tried to Jerk Away From the Old Fellow 100 

Andy Caught Seventeen Rats. 112 

I Had Never Been to a Circus . 123 

The Door Was Locked . 129 

Long Pants and Bare Feet is a Combination 

You Can’t Get Away With. 139 

I Stopped on the Police-Station Steps and 
Took a Long Breath. 157 
















Me and Andy 

CHAPTER ONE 

I ’M GOING to tell you, as well as I can, about the 
trip that my dog, Andy, and I took right after 
Dad died. Of course, I can’t tell all of it, or I’d 
never get it into a book short enough for anyone to 
bother with reading; so I’ll just tell the principal 
things. But first, I’ll tell about Mother and Dad 
and Andy. 

It won’t take me so very long to tell you all I 
know about Mother, I having been only a few weeks 
old when she died. But I have a photograph of her, 
and I’ve heard Dad talk about her a little, when he 
hadn’t been drinking, and so wasn’t ashamed of 
himself. That was Dad’s only bad fault. He did 
drink sometimes. 

Mother’s picture shows her sitting in a straight- 
back chair, and holding some flowers and a long, 
white roll of paper in her lap. The paper was her 
wedding diploma, I guess. Her face was the sweet¬ 
est one that ever was, and her hair was like a crown 
above it, for it was braided and then wrapped 
about her head. I suppose that bobbed hair is all 
right, but I’m sort of glad, when I look at Mother’s 


1 


2 


Me md Andy. 


picture, that it hadn’t come into style in her day. 
She was prettier the way she was. Her dress was 
very pretty, too. It was all white, and came clear 
down to the floor, with just the tips of her little, 
white shoes sticking out from under it. The sleeves 
were almost as big as a whole dress is now days, 
but somehow they seemed to belong in the picture, 
and not to be funny at all. 

Dad thought a lot of that picture. Usually he 
kept it on the shelf by the clock, but when he’d been 
drunk he would hide it a few days. I guess he was 
ashamed to face Mother’s picture, when he’d been 
acting in a way that he knew would have hurt her, 
if she had been alive. When he had drink in him. 
Dad was sort of rough, like most of the men at the 
freight-house where he worked, but when he was 
sober he had good manners, and was polite, even 
to me. When he got very drunk, he was still dif¬ 
ferent, and would walk up and down our room re¬ 
citing poetry. Lots of it was in Latin, or Greek, 
or some other language that I couldn’t understand, 
but it sounded fine, and the way that words rolled 
was just beautiful. 

I liked that kind of poetry, but I liked it bet¬ 
ter when Dad would pretend that he was a fellow 
named Hamlet, or another one called Macbeth. Both 
of these fellows were kings, or dukes, or some such 



Chapter One 


3 


folks, and they had a wonderful time of it, mak¬ 
ing long-winded speeches, killing folks, and raising 
Old Harry generally. You could just see them for 
yourself, when Dad got to going it good. 

Dad had an old fiddle, too, and sometimes he’d 
play it for hours at a stretch. Most of his tunes 
were sort of sad-like and lonesome, but not all of 
them. Once in a while, that old fiddle would fairly 
laugh and talk, as though it was so happy it just 
couldn’t stand it. Both kinds of music were pretty, 
but I liked the happy kind the best. Sometimes the 
family that lived in the front half of the attic would 
pound on the wall for Dad to stop, but he always 
pretended it was only applause and kept right on. 

By and by, Dad would lay down his fiddle and 
would drop off to sleep in his chair. Then I’d roll 
him up on our bed, take his shoes off and cover him 
up. He’d be good to sleep for at least sixteen hours; 
so I’d get what was left of his money, and then 
Andy and I’d go down to the Greek’s at Forty- 
seventh Street for a regular meal. Dad had told 
me to do that, for he was awfully good to me when 
he was sober, and was terribly ashamed of having 
been drunk. While I was looking for the money, 
Andy would sit watching me, with his head cocked 
on one side; he was terribly disappointed if I didn’t 
find any money. Usually I did, though. Once I 



4__ Me and Andy. 

found five dollars, and Andy and I ate high for 
three days. 

I didn’t go to school as much as I ought to have 
done in those days, and I didn’t like it much, when 
I did go, because most of the fellows were sort of 
hostile. Besides, I couldn’t take Andy. The teach¬ 
ers in that school weren’t any too friendly, either. 
Once, one of them slapped me, because she thought 
that I was lying to her when I said that I wasn’t 
chewing gum. I wasn’t lying, because it wasn’t 
gum, but an old rubber band. I didn’t care much 
for it, but I’d had no breakfast that morning, and 
it’s easier to get along empty when you chew on 
something. But that was none of her business; so 
when she insisted on knowing why I was working 
my jaws, if I wasn’t chewing gum, I just set my 
teeth and said nothing. So I was expelled for being 
stubborn, and I was glad of it, because I didn’t like 
that school, anyhow. I got to be almost as good at 
dodging the truant officer as Andy was at keeping 
out of the way of dog-catchers. 

Andy’s a mighty good dog, and always was. He 
started out in life to be an Airedale, but he forgot 
to stop growing at the right time, and his hair got 
too long around his neck, which discouraged him, 
I guess. But he weighs eighty-eight pounds, and 
he can lick lots of fancy dogs that think they’re bet- 



Chapter One 


5 


ter than he is, when they’re not. Dogs are a lot 
like folks that way. 

Of course, Andy’s size is one thing that makes 
people stop to look at him, but he’s different from 
most dogs in other ways, too. He’s a gentleman, 
and no one needs a second look to tell that. You 
can see from the very way he walks that he fears 
no man or dog in the world, but his eyes are as 
gentle as a puppy’s. Those great teeth can crush 
a beef knuckle; yet a baby can walk up to him and 
pull his ears while he’s eating, and he’ll not even 
growl at it. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen 
Andy angry, except when he’s had to defend either 
himself or me. He’s terrible then. 

Andy’s honest, too; he never did steal, except, 
maybe, when he was hungry and couldn’t find any 
garbage pails open, or else in winter when they 
were all frozen up. He’s smart, too, and could do 
lots of tricks when he was younger. He could now, 
if he wanted to, but since he hasn’t had to hustle 
for his meals he’s been getting a bit fat and lazy. 
That’s another way that dogs are like folks. 



CHAPTER TWO 


D AD quit drinking all of a sudden, and began 
to be interested in me and in Andy. I never 
knew how he came to do it, for he never said a 
word about it; he just seemed to brace up and to 
be twice the man that he had been. He quit talk¬ 
ing rough, too, and shaved every day, instead of 
only on Sundays, and he pressed his clothes and 
shined his shoes. He was a fine looking man, but 
I’d never realized how much so before, because his 
face had been kind of puffy. Now, though, it was 
smooth and thin, tanned dark, but with a kind of 
paleness that seemed to shine through from under¬ 
neath. He was a very tall man, broad but thin and 
he had dark eyes and a perfect tangle of black hair. 
Black, that is, except next to his ears; it was gray 
there. When he walked, he carried himself very 
straight, and looked straight ahead of him. I was 
mighty proud of Dad. I can tell you, now that he’d 
slicked up. I’d always tried to be, but I didn’t have 
to try now. It was easy. 

He quit the job at the freight-house, too, and got 
him another one. The new job was selling some¬ 
thing or other to stores and to offices, and I don’t 
think he made any more money than he had before, 


6 


Chapter Two 


7 


but he spent it in a different way, which was just 
as good as more money. For example; he got new 
suits of clothes for each of us, and bought a license 
for Andy, so that I shouldn’t have to hide him when 
the dog-catchers came around. Take it all in all, 
we had things pretty fine those days, with meat and 
canned fruit in the house all the time and milk for 
me to drink. I had a clean blouse, too, for every 
day in the week except Saturday. But I had to go 
to school regular. 

I didn’t mind that so very much now, though, for 
things at school seemed to go better for me. My 
new teacher was nice to me, and the boys weren’t 
hostile any more. Funny, isn’t it, what a differ¬ 
ence a few new clothes can make in the way most 
people treat you? I was rather behind in my school 
work, on account of having gone so little; so I used 
to bring all my books home and study at night by 
our table. It was pretty slow business at first, but 
Dad helped me whenever I got really stuck, which 
made things much pleasanter for me. I’d never 
known that Dad knew so much. Why, my teacher 
couldn’t hold a candle to him. 

When I wasn’t needing his help, Dad would sit 
there by the table with his pipe and a book, some¬ 
times reading and smoking, but more often doing 
neither; just sitting, kind of watching me and 



8 


Me and Andy 

dreaming-like. Andy would lie beside his chair 
then, looking up at Dad, and once in a while thump¬ 
ing his stubby tail on the floor to show that he ap¬ 
proved of things around there. He was wise, was 
Andy, and knew that Dad was different and more 
friendly. But Andy had to quit bringing bones into 
the house and I had to quit smoking. I quit cuss¬ 
ing too, seeing that Dad had, though I’d slip once 
in a while, especially at first. But I really did try 
to learn to talk more like Dad did and less like I 
had been doing. 

Dad talked of moving to a better neighborhood 
as soon as he could get a bit of money saved up, 
and he told me that I might join the Boy Scouts and 
go camping with them that summer, if I wished. 
And he brought home a big piece of linoleum for 
the floor of our room, so that we might keep it 
cleaner. He got new bed-clothes, too. I tell you, 
life was pretty slick around our place those days; 
I had everything any of the fellows had, except a 
mother. 

I might have known that it was too good to last. 
Dad came home one night in April, feeling kind of 
bad and coughing a little. I was out in the alley 
with Andy at the time, which was a way we’d had 
of late, when we knew he’d be coming soon; so we 
ran to meet him, and right away I saw that some- 



Chapter Two 


9 


thing was wrong with him. At first, just for a 
second, I thought that maybe he’d gone to drink¬ 
ing again, but I’d no sooner thought that than I 
became ashamed of myself, for I saw that it wasn’t 
true, but that he was sick. 

There was one long flight of stairs that ran 
straight out into the back yard from our room in 
the attic, and they were pretty steep. There were 
thirty-four steps in that flight of stairs, and it must 
have taken Dad nearly five minutes to climb them 
that evening, even with me helping him. But we 
finally made it, and Dad let himself down into his 
chair, breathing hard and holding his hand as close 
as he could to the place under his shoulder blade, 
which was where he hurt worst. 

“I didn’t get into the store, Jack,” said he, “so 
you’ll have to get something for supper.” Then he 
gave me a dollar, and Andy and I went out and 
fetched home a can of beans, some bread, and a lit¬ 
tle bottle of cream. There was some butter and 
some coffee on hand, and so I got things together 
and helped Dad to the table, where he drank a lit¬ 
tle coffee, but ate nothing. Then he lighted his 
pipe, but laid it down at once and asked me to help 
him into bed. 

I noticed while I was helping him undress that 
Dad was terribly hot to the touch. He acted in ai 



10 


Me and Andy 


peculiar way, too, and asked me to kiss him good¬ 
night, a thing I never remember his having done 
before. I thought it was kind of queer, but I did 
it, and he said I was a good boy. I knew better, of 
course, but I wouldn’t contradict him when he was 
so sick. Then he said, “How would you like to go 
to Missouri and live with your grandfather? You 
have one in a little town down there, you know.” 
I hadn’t known it before, and any other time I’d 
have been interested. 

But just then, I couldn’t think of anything ex¬ 
cept the fact that Dad was so sick. So I never 
even asked the name of the town where my grand¬ 
father lived, but said, “No Sir; I’d rather stay right 
here, and live with you,” which seemed to please 
him, for he said, “Thank you, Jack,” and patted 
my hand. Then he turned his face to the wall and 
seemed to go to sleep. 

I went back to my chair and picked up the eve¬ 
ning paper, and tried to read for a while, but it 
was no go. The room was too lonesome; so I gave 
it up and crawled into bed with Dad. 

Along about three in the morning I waked up. 
Dad was tossing around too much for me to stay 
asleep any longer, and he was talking away to him¬ 
self in a queer, high voice. He kept saying, “Yes, 
yes, yes,” over and over again almost a hundred 



Chapter Two 


11 


times in a row. Then he’d sing or whistle a little, 
but break off almost in the middle of a note to say, 
“I’m so happy.” He did that whole performance 
half a dozen times, without changing it one little 
bit. Then, just as I was beginning to think he’d 
never stop, he sat straight up in bed, pointed his 
finger across the room and said, “Very well, Gen¬ 
tlemen; you have my resignation, and I wish you 
every success. I’ll teach only what I believe. I’d 
rather be a day laborer than do otherwise. Good 
day, Gentlemen.” Then he got up from the bed 
and stood in the middle of the floor, sort of sway¬ 
ing there in the moon-light as though he were about 
to fall. 

You can just bet your bottom dollar that I was 
more than scared then. I was out of bed quicker 
than you could say, “Jack Robinson,” and had lit 
the light. Dad’s eyes were all glazy, as though he 
was more than half asleep, but they were shiny 
too. At first he didn’t know what I was talking 
about, when I tried to get him to go back to bed. 
But, by and by, he understood me and minded me, 
as though he were a little child. He wasn’t able 
to lift his feet into bed, though; I had to do that. 

When I’d got him sitting in the bed again, I 
noticed that his night-shirt was open over his chest 
and that on each side there was a spot that was 



12 


Me and Andy 


flushed as red with fever as his face was. He was 
terribly hot all over; so I thought that maybe a big 
drink of water might help, and got it for him. He 
drank it almost at one gulp, and just let the glass 
fall to the bed, instead of handing it back to me. 



/ thought maybe a drink of water might help 


Then he reached up and took my face between his 
two hands and looked at me for a long time, as 
though he were puzzled. Finally, he said in a sur¬ 
prised way, “Why, it’s Jack, isn’t it? You’re a 
good boy, Jack. I’ll be all right in the morning.” 

I told Andy to stay there with Dad, and then I 







































Chapter Two 


13 


jumped into my clothes a lot faster than I’d ever 
done before, slid down our stair rail, and cut 
through the alley for the doctor. He was such an 
awfully long time getting dressed that I went on 
home and waited there for him. When, at last, he 
came, he went all over Dad’s chest with a funny¬ 
looking sort of a telephone thing that had little 
rubber pipes running up to his ears. Then he shook 
his head in a very serious way, and said, “Double 
pneumonia.” That’s a fairly hard word but, at 
that, I guess I’ll never forget how to spell it. 

For about half an hour, the doctor just sat there 
beside Dad, watching his face, and once in a while 
reaching over to feel his pulse. Every time he felt 
the pulse, the doctor would clear his throat a bit, 
and then shake his head again. Usually he’d mut¬ 
ter, “Not so good, not so good.” Finally, he seemed 
to have made up his mind about things, for he 
wrote a prescription and sent me out to get it filled. 
He said he’d wait there till I got back. I hurried 
as fast as I could, but the night man at the drug¬ 
store was even harder to rouse than the doctor had 
been, and was a bit cross, too, when he saw that 
he’d been waked to wait on a boy. The medicine 
was eighty-five cents, but there was quite a lot of it. 

As soon as I got back to our room with the medi¬ 
cine, the doctor gave a dose of it to Dad and told 



14 


Me and Andy 


me to give him another in three hours, if he was 
awake. “I’ll come back in a few hours,” said the 
doctor, and he did. 

Dad was sick just three days, and then he died. 
Along towards the last, he kept thinking that 
Mother was sitting there beside him, but it was 
only the nurse that the doctor had brought in. 
Thinking that made Dad very happy, but it was 
sort of hard on me. Sometimes, I couldn’t quite 
stand it, and then I’d go out in the alley and talk 
to Andy for a while. He was an awfully fine man, 
Dad was, and there hadn’t anybody better try to 
tell me different. 

There was some insurance in the freight-han¬ 
dlers’ union that hadn’t run out yet; so they came 
and gave Dad a fine funeral with flowers and a 
preacher and three automobiles. A lot of the men 
that Dad had worked with came, and so did some 
from the office he worked at after he left the 
freight-house. The man who ran the second-hand 
book store was there, too. After the funeral was 
over, I heard the preacher telling the boss of the 
Union that he’d attend to taking me into court, 
and having me put into a Home. I was scared 
stiff, when I heard that. 




CHAPTER THREE 


T HE reason I was so scared at the idea of being 
taken to court was that I’d already been there 
once, and knew better than to want to go again. 
It was all on account of old Behnke, the meat-mar¬ 
ket man. 

You see, I’d gone into Behnke’s shop one time and 
asked him to let me have some sausage, or a little 
cold ham, or something, and I’d told him that I’d 
pay him, as soon as I could find Dad and get the 
money. That was before Dad had straightened up, 
you know. Well, I didn’t think I was asking for 
such a very big favor, because Behnke would get 
his money all right, and would sell some meat that 
otherwise he wouldn’t, but he didn’t look at it that 
way at all. He flared right up and yelled at me, 
“You get out of here, you little devil! You’re going 
to be a dead-beat, just like your old man. He owes 
me three dollars now that I’m never going to get.” 

My, but that made me mad! It wasn’t true, 
either, because Dad never beat anybody in his life, 
even though he had to be a bit slow about paying, 
sometimes. It wasn’t the three dollars that made 
Behnke hate us at all. It was because Dad had 


15 


16_ Me and Andy 

laughed at Behnke one time when there was a 
crowd standing around. 

Somehow or other, Behnke had got the notion 
into his head that he wanted to be a congressman. 
In fact, he was so sure he could be one, that he 
went and got him a wide, black hat and a long¬ 
tailed coat to wear on the street; so that when folks 
saw him they would know how he’d look down in 
Washington. Evenings, after his shop was closed, 
Behnke would put on his new outfit and walk up 
and down our street, stopping folks now and then 
to talk to them, and tell them what a fine congress¬ 
man he thought he would make. Naturally, he 
finally ran into Dad. As soon as Dad caught sight 
of Behnke in his new outfit, he was amused and 
asked where the tent was, pretending he thought 
Behnke was an actor in an Uncle Tom’s Cabin 
show. But Behnke explained to him that he wanted 
to go to Congress. “May I not rely upon your vote, 
Mr. Bradford?” he asked Dad. I’d never heard 
Behnke use words like that before, and they didn’t 
sound to me as though they really belonged to him. 
But Dad became very solemn, and took his hat off 
and stood with it under his arm. 

“This is a most important matter, Sir,” said he 
in a very loud voice, which brought a small crowd 
around them. “Before I can vouchsafe you my bal- 



Chapter Three 


17 


lot, Sir,” Dad went on, “I must know how you stand 
upon the burning issues of the hour.” 

“I’m for a high tariff, a full dinner pail, and all 
the rights of the workingman,” answered Behnke, 
trying to look as solemn as Dad did. 

“Excellent, Sir, excellent,” Dad boomed, “but 
there is another measure that is very close to my 
heart, and before I promise you my vote I must 
have your solemn pledge on that measure. You 
must promise me to work unceasingly for the re¬ 
peal of Mendel’s Law. That law, Sir, has done 
more harm than any other.” 

“Then I’ll wipe it out,” said Behnke. “What 
does the law say?” 

“That a jackass must have ears like his father’s,” 
answered Dad, and the crowd whooped. Nobody 
ever saw Behnke’s long-tailed coat again after that 
night, but Behnke never forgave Dad, and that’s 
why he called him a dead-beat to me. 

I was so mad at Behnke’s calling my father a 
dead-beat that I wanted to do something mean to 
him. That’s a wrong way to feel, and I know it 
now, but just then I was too angry to think about 
that. So, when I got out in the street, I stood and 
looked around, trying to think of something to do 
to Behnke. It didn’t take me long to decide, either, 
for the things I needed were right at hand. They 



18_ Me and Andy 

always are, when you’re about to do something you 
shouldn’t. 

Right in front of his meat-market, Behnke had 
a barrel standing. The barrel was half filled with 
rabbits, and there were other rabbits hanging on 
the outside of it. They were frozen stiff, for it 
was winter at the time, but I managed to move 
them apart far enough to make room for a cat that 
had learned about automobiles too late to get any 
good from his lesson. I could have had a rabbit in 
trade for him, if I hadn’t been more honest than 
I was hungry, but I’m not that sort. I just hung 
the cat there and went on about my business. 

But Mike Polska had seen me hang him there, 
and he went and told Behnke. So Behnke had me 
arrested, because everybody in the neighborhood 
was laughing at him again. Lots of people hate to 
be laughed at; I do, myself, and so does Andy. 

As soon as Dad came home, every kid in the block 
ran to tell him I’d been locked up, and he came 
down to get me out. By good luck, it was his pay¬ 
day; so he left ten dollars with the man at the 
desk, and they let me out. Dad scolded me for 
what I’d done, but, when I told him how it hap¬ 
pened, he never said another word. He just took 
me into the nearest restaurant and bought me a 
square meal. He was that kind of a father. He 



Chapter Three 


19 


laid off from his work to go to court with me the 
next day, too. 

The court-room was upstairs over the police-sta¬ 
tion, and was a big room cut in half by a wooden 
rail. Only lawyers, witnesses and folks that had 
been arrested were allowed inside the rail. The 
others had to sit on the benches outside. Most of 
them looked as though they ought to be arrested, 
too. The judge sat up behind a high counter that 
had electric lights at each end. He didn’t have any 
wig, like judges always wear in pictures, but he 
needed one. I guess he couldn’t have afforded it, 
though, for he couldn’t have been getting much 
money for judging, because he had only half an eye¬ 
glass for each eye. The top halves were missing. 

By and by, when I’d almost begun to think that 
the other cases were going to take all morning, they 
got around to mine, and the man who was helping 
the judge told me to raise my right hand and be 
sworn. I was glad then that there’d been other 
cases ahead of mine, for the man talked so fast 
that, if I hadn’t heard him half a dozen times 
already, I couldn’t have understood a word he was 
saying. As it was, I missed about half of it. 

Then Behnke climbed up in a chair at the end 
of the counter, and told the judge and everybody 
there how mean I was and how Dad had insulted 



20 


Me and Andy 

him about going to Congress. He was going along 
at a great rate, but the judge stopped him and told 
him to stick to the cat and the rabbits. That was 
pretty decent of the judge, I thought; so when it 
came to my turn to climb up into the chair and talk, 
I was real polite. Anyhow, I tried to be. 

“What’s your name?” the judge asked me. 

“Jack Bradford.” 

“Did you hang that dead cat in front of this 
man’s store?” 

“Yes,” said I. 

“Say Sir to me,” said the judge. So I said it. 

“That’s better,” said he. “Now tell me why you 
did this thing.” 

“Because you told me to,” I answered, suppos¬ 
ing he was still talking about manners. But he 
wasn’t talking about manners at all any more. He 
was back to talking about that cat again. But how 
was I to know that? 

“Confound your impudence!” he yelled at me. 
“I mean why did you hang that dead cat in front 
of this man’s store?” 

“Because I don’t like him,” I said, which was the 
truth, exactly as I’d promised to tell it. 

“Well, see here, young man,” said the judge to 
me. “You can’t go around playing dirty, disor¬ 
derly tricks on everybody you happen not to like. 


Chapter Three 


21 


If you ever are brought into my court again, I’ll 
put you in a school for bad boys and leave you there 
until you grow up. You may go now, but see to it 
that you don’t forget what I’ve told you.” 

You can just bet that I didn’t forget, either, and 
when I heard that minister say he was going to 
take me into court, I said to myself real quiet-like, 
“You think you will.” 

There wasn’t any room for me in the automo¬ 
biles that went out to the cemetery, on account of 
there being only three cars and so many important 
grown folks that had to ride, but it was all right 
with me, because I’d already said good-bye to Dad, 
and wanted just to be alone with Andy. Besides, 
I had to hurry up and clear out before that preacher 
got hold of me to take me into court. So, while 
they were climbing into the cars, I slipped away 
and went home. 

Andy was waiting for me when I got there, and 
we went up-stairs together. I was glad to have 
him with me, too, for, though I’d already missed 
Dad a lot, it was a great deal worse to come into 
the room where I’d been so used to seeing him, and 
to realize that he’d never be there again. And, 
when I saw his pipe and the old coat he’d worn 
around the room evenings, I just sat down in his 
old chair and blubbered like a baby. I don’t care 



22 


Me and Andy 


how big a fellow is, he can’t help crying at a time 
like that. I’d known for two days that Dad was 
gone, but it seemed then as though I’d only just 
found out what it all meant to me. 

It was so quiet in the room that I got our old 
alarm clock and wound it up for company for me 
and Andy. I never did hear a clock tick quite so 
loudly before, but it only made the place seem lone- 
somer than ever. I couldn’t have stood it at all, if 
it hadn’t been for Andy. He seemed to understand 
everything, for he came up, and stood with his great 
head resting on the arm of the chair, looking up 
into my face, as if to tell me he’d help me if he 
could. That’s the best thing there is about a dog. 
He always feels the same way you do about every¬ 
thing. 

I sat and thought for a while, and I decided that 
probably I’d better go to Missouri and live with 
my grandfather. I didn’t even know his name, or 
what town he lived in, but I reckoned that I could 
find him all right, if I took time enough for it and 
asked enough questions. I figured that I’d have to 
walk it, because there was only six dollars left in 
the house, and I couldn’t live very long on that, if 
I was paying railroad fare. If I was going to 
walk, I’d have to travel pretty light; so I left Dad’s 



Chapter Three 


23 


big satchel, and took the little one he’d got for me 
to carry my school books in. 

Of course the little satchel wouldn’t hold much, 
but there was room in it for a couple of clean 
blouses and some stockings. My good suit I already 
was wearing. So I put into the little satchel only 
the blouses and stockings, with Mother’s picture, 
my handkerchiefs and one fish-line. I had a lot 
of junk that I’d collected, but I had to leave all of 
it. But I took Dad’s pocket-knife, and his violin. 
I could play it pretty well by ear. 

Our room was no great place, I know, but I’d 
lived there ever since I could remember, and I felt 
very queer about leaving it. I straightened it up 
as well as I could, and stood in the doorway look¬ 
ing around for a minute. Then I shut the door as 
softly as I could and tip-toed down the stairs. I 
don’t know why I walked that way, I just did. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

I HAD been longer than I had expected in get¬ 
ting ready to go away, for it was night, when 
I came down our back stairs and rested for a mo¬ 
ment in the alley. But I was rather glad of that, 
since there was that much less chance of my being 
seen and so being taken before the judge. Night is 
a very pleasant time, anyhow, when the weather is 
fine, for the air has a softness that you never feel 
in the day-time. Besides, nothing ever looks ugly 
in the dark; ash-heaps and garbage-cans just melt 
into shadows, while even the smells are less mean 
than they are in the day-time, for there is almost 
always a bit of night-breeze a-blowing. And the 
sky over an alley is every mite as beautiful as it is 
over the boulevard, where rich people live. 

You can spend a great deal of time looking up at 
the sky, and not waste a bit of it. First, you try 
to count the stars, starting out at it bravely enough, 
but not getting very far with your work; for, be¬ 
fore you’ve been at the job five minutes, your eye 
has been caught by some star that is brighter than 
the others about it, and you fall to wondering. 
You wonder how big the star really is, and how 
far away; whether it truly is a world like ours, and, 


24 


Chapter Four 


25 


if so, whether the people on it are anything like we 
are; and whether there is anybody among them who 
is looking at our world and wondering about us. 

Somehow, by the time your neck has got to ach¬ 
ing so badly that you can’t look up any longer, you 
have forgotten most of your troubles. You feel 
mightly small and unimportant, but you feel sort 
of clean and washed-like, too, and decide that you 
never again will be quite so mean as you have been. 
It’s a good deal the same way that you feel after 
listening to a big organ; only it’s more so and stays 
with you better. 

There’s a thrilly feeling about being out alone 
at night, too, provided you’re brave enough not to 
mind being scared a little. You can get it best 
when you’ve just finished reading some corking 
good book, such as Treasure Island, or Robinson 
Crusoe, or Buffalo Bill’s Revenge. Then, there are 
Indians and pirates, and cannibals in every shadow; 
but you pay no attention to them, except to hitch 
your belt a bit tighter and to make sure that your 
cutlass and pistols are ready to use. Of course, 
they’re only wooden ones, but, all the same, you 
feel a bit more comfortable for having them, and 
you stalk along with your chest stuck out, maybe 
whistling a bit to bid defiance to all mutineers and 
malcontents. 



26 


Me and Andy 


I always did like that fine, especially when I had 
Andy along for company. A big dog trotting be¬ 
side a fellow can’t help but make him a little braver 
than he would be when absolutely alone. In fact, 
a good dog is mighty fine company at any time. 
I suppose I’ve probably said that before, but it’s 
worth repeating. As a matter of fact, I guess that 
everything I ever said in my life, or ever will say, 
has been said before by somebody else and said bet¬ 
ter. But there’s this advantage in being reason¬ 
ably ignorant; when you think what you think is a 
big thought, you aren’t always remembering right 
away who it was that said it before. I suppose that 
that idea is an old one, too. 

Goodness me! Here I am, rambling along about 
cannibals and stars, ash-heaps and thoughts, when 
what I started out to tell you was about me and 
Andy leaving home. It sounds as though I must 
have stood in the alley for hours and hours, but it 
was really only a very few minutes before I picked 
up my fiddle and the little, old school satchel, and 
was on my way, with Andy at my heels. 

We went down alleys for about a mile, so as not 
to be noticed until we got a ways from home; then 
we cut across some vacant lots to a street that runs 
clear out of the city and for miles without end far¬ 
ther. It’s called Western Avenue, and it runs south. 



Chapter Four 


27 


So as Missouri is south and west from Chicago, I 
figured that we’d take Western Avenue until we 
came to some cross road that we liked, and then 
turn west. When we got too tired of walking west, 
we could walk south some more and, maybe, if we 
were real lucky, by and by we’d stumble on to some 
road that slanted right up to my grandfather’s 
door. Then, if he and I liked each other, and he 
liked Andy, we’d live with him; but if he didn’t, or 
we didn’t, we wouldn’t, but would keep on walking 
until we got to some place we liked, and where they 
liked us. I hadn’t the least doubt in the world that 
we’d run into somebody, somewhere, who’d appre¬ 
ciate a dog like Andy enough to let me earn a home 
for both of us. 

I’d decided that we’d walk twenty or twenty-five 
miles a day, but that fifteen miles would probably 
be enough for the first night. It was, too, as you 
already know, if you’ve ever hoofed it along a road 
at night with a satchel in one hand and a fiddle 
case in the other, turning out of the road every few 
feet in order to let an automobile whiz by you. It 
takes a very few miles of that to tire you. 

The first two hours or so, we got along finely, but 
then I began to count the telephone poles, figuring 
that there must be about fifty of them to the mile, 
and forty steps from pole to pole. That makes two 



28 


Me and Andy 


thousand steps to the mile, and it meant that I had 
about thirteen thousand more steps to take that 
night, which sounded like an awful lot, and was. 
But I started in bravely enough to count them off, 
and kept right at it until I got up to three thou¬ 
sand; then I tried counting backwards to see if the 
distance wouldn’t seem shorter when it was all the 
time reducing. But a mile is a mile any way you 
count it, except that a tired mile is much longer 
than a fresh one. 

So, I changed from steps and telephone poles to 
counting automobiles, deciding that as soon as I’d 
met five hundred more cars I’d call it a night, and 
hunt for a place where Andy and I might sleep. Per¬ 
haps, I’d have had to give up the automobile count¬ 
ing too, if I hadn’t had a bit of good luck, when I 
was still two hundred short in my count. The good 
luck was in our coming to a place where the road 
was blocked by a freight train that kept switching 
back and forth, as though it had all the time there 
was. Of course, there was no traveling for us, 
while that train was in the way; so I sat down on 
the low wall of a little bridge, just short of the 
track, to rest my feet, and to count my sore spots, 
which were plenty. It seemed as though I never 
would want to stand up or to walk again as long 
as I lived. Andy lay down in the dust, close to my 



29 


Chapter Four 

feet, and seemed glad to rest, though he wasn’t too 
tired to keep an eye on my fiddle and satchel, or to 
growl when someone turned a spot-light on us. 

The automobilists kept jawing about having to 
wait so long, but I didn’t. It was duck-soup for 
me, because the automobiles were lining up on the 
other side of the track just as they were on the side 
where we were. When, at last, the train pulled out, 
all the cars I’d promised myself to meet that night 
were there waiting for me. All I had to do was 
to stand aside and count them as they went by. 
Really, there were fifty more than I needed, which 
was a great help, because I like to finish what I 
begin and to make a good job of it. I hate a quitter, 
you know. 

Having all those cars handed to me wasn’t all of 
my good luck, either, for the lights of the cars that 
were going my way shone across a field at a bend 
in the road, and showed a barn that looked to be 
just the place for me and Andy to park ourselves 
for the rest of the night. The fence-gate was locked, 
but it was no bother to me to crawl under it. A fel¬ 
low doesn’t mind a little thing like that, when he’s 
dog-tired and sees a good barn. 

You may think that you appreciate your dog but, 
unless you’ve had him along the first time you’ve 
crawled into a strange barn to sleep, you don’t 



so 


Me and Andy 


know what a comfort he really is, because you’ve 
never been really, honest-to-goodness lonesome. You 
can guess how ashamed I was then, when Andy sat 
up to beg for his supper, and I hadn’t a bite of 
anything to give him. 



I went right off to sleep 


Gee! How cheap I felt. I’d had so much misery 
and worry of my own that day that I’d never real¬ 
ized we’d have to go right on eating, just as we’d 
always done, and would even need food before we 
slept. I didn’t make any excuses, though, because 
I knew that, though a fellow has a right to forget 





Chapter Four 


31 


his own dinner, a boy that forgets his dog’s meals 
is simply no good. So I just promised Andy that 
it would never happen again, and he seemed to 
understand, for he quit begging at once. 

I cried a bit that night on account of missing 
Dad. I knew I was too big to cry, but I just 
couldn’t help it, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. 
I’ve never really cried since, but I’ve come pretty 
close to it a good many times, and I guess that if 
I get to be as big as Methuselah, who lived and 
grew for a thousand years, I’ll always get lumpy in 
the throat when I think about him. 

One thing I did that night, that I forget some¬ 
times, was to say my prayers. Somehow or other, 
they’re easier to remember when you’re miserable. 
After I’d said them, I went right off to sleep, and 
the next thing I knew was Andy’s licking my face 
to tell me that it was morning. 




CHAPTER FIVE 


HEN I sat up in the hay on the barn floor 



that morning, I saw something that was 


worth going a long way to look at. The sun was 
just coming up over the top of a little hill half a 
mile down the road, and I leaned back against the 
barn wall to watch it through the open door. Doing 
that made the door-way into a regular picture- 
frame; only the picture was much more beautiful 
than the ones you see printed. Since that time I’ve 
often looked through door-ways, pretending that 
they were picture-frames, and I’ve always been well 
paid for my trouble. When I’ve wanted a picture 
that was a bit larger than the one I was seeing, all 
I’ve had to do was to go one step nearer the door. 
Try it, yourself, some time; you’ll be surprised, for 
it’s fine and it doesn’t cost you a cent. 

I’ve seen a lot of pictures that way, but that first 
one was by far the best. I ought to know a good 
picture when I see one, too, for once I watched a 
real artist all morning. He was in a window over 
on Ashland Avenue, and he was a crackajack, all 
right, for he could paint a picture that had in it a 
man in a boat, a lake with a mountain on the far 
side of it, and a farm-house with a barn, trees, cows 


32 


Chapter Five 


33 


and a hay-stack, and could do the whole job in ten 
minutes. He sold some of them, too, right while I 
stood there watching him. One that he sold had 
real knife-handle-pearl windows, and it fetched him 
four dollars, counting the frame of course. So you 
can see for yourself that he was no slouch of an 
artist. But a sunrise seen through an open barn¬ 
door has any hand-painted picture beaten a mile, 
and you may tell anyone you wish that Jack Brad¬ 
ford says so. 

Pretty soon, the sun was clear up above the hill, 
and then I remembered that I’d had no supper the 
night before. So I said to Andy, “Breakfast-time, 
Andy. Want your breakfast?” Usually, when I 
say that to him, Andy’ll lie down and roll over two 
or three times, but that morning he did nothing of 
the sort. He just sat there, with one ear down and 
one ear up, listening to me. So I asked him again, 
and he yawned. 

“That’s funny,” I thought. “He was hungry 
enough last night. Somebody must have fed him.” 
Then I said aloud, “Andy, where did you get your 
breakfast?” 

Mind you, now, I’m not saying that Andy un¬ 
derstands everything that I say to him. I’m only 
telling you what he did, and letting you decide for 
yourself as to how smart he is. Whether it was 



84 


Me and Andy 


just luck, or whether Andy really understood me, 
what he did was to turn right around and walk out 
through that door-way. Then he barked once for 
me to follow him and, as soon as he saw that I was 
really coming, he trotted up a little path that led 
past two more barns, and then through an orchard 
and up to the back door of a house. When he got 
there, he went up on the porch and walked straight 
over to a pan that was sitting there. He licked the 
pan once or twice; then turned around and looked 
at me, with his tongue hanging out and a grin on 
his face, as much as to say, “Well, this is the place.” 
Now, was that brains, or was it only instinct? 

I decided right then that it was brains, and that 
it was up to me to show as much sense as my dog 
had done. So, I went to the door and knocked, and 
right away it was opened. 

You can tell a great deal about a woman by the 
way in which she answers her back door. If she 
pulls it open with a jerk, and sticks her head out to 
look at you, you can save yourself a bit of time by 
asking neither favors nor questions, because you 
know her answer already. It’s, “No!” because she’s 
that sort of woman. Some are that way all the 
time, and some only a part of the time; some are 
born that way, and some get that way as they get 
older. There are some women, too, who come to the 



Chapter Five 


35 


door on tip-toe, and then only after they’ve peeked 
around the edge of the curtain to see who is there. 
That kind is scared, and either afraid of tramps, 
or else expecting a bill collector when they haven’t 
the money to pay. They’ve probably got so used to 
being afraid that they sort of like it, and would be 
lonesome without their fears. 

But the lady who came to the back door that 
Andy had picked out was none of those sorts that 
I’ve been talking about, and I could tell by the very 
way she came across the room that she would swing 
the door wide open and would ask me in. That’s 
just what she did, too, and I remembered my man¬ 
ners; wiping my feet on the bit of old carpet that 
lay outside the door, and taking off my cap, as I 
stepped across the threshold, after first telling Andy 
to wait for me; which he did. He always does, you 
know. 

The woman was a good deal as you would expect 
her to be, opening the door that way, and the room 
was the sort a fellow likes to be invited into; nice 
and clean, but not fancy; with a floor of wide, soft¬ 
wood boards that had been scrubbed until it was as 
white as milk, and with pretty bits of rag carpet 
lying about here and there. There was a big stove, 
too, and two tables, a little one for working and a 
big one for eating. The window curtains weren’t 




36 


Me and Andy 


lace, but they couldn’t have been any whiter than 
they were. On the wall, there was a shelf of dark 
wood with a big, solemn clock, and there were at 
least half a dozen calendars, each with a pretty pic¬ 
ture on it. You could tell the date from any point 
in that room without bothering to turn around. I 
like things to be convenient like that. 

There was a rocking chair in that kitchen, too, 
and that always tells a lot. A rocking chair in a 
dirty kitchen spells laziness, but in a clean one it 
means good common sense. Of course, there were 
straight-back chairs too. 

I hardly need to tell you what the woman herself 
was like, for you’d have guessed from the way I’ve 
been describing the room that she was wearing a 
blue dress and that she had white hair. She had a 
good many wrinkles, too, but they were the kind 
that only come to people who smile a lot. It was a 
good thing for her that folks can’t choose their own 
grandmothers, for she’d have had so many grand¬ 
children that it would have taken a barrel of flour 
a day just to keep them in cookies. I’d never had 
a grandmother, but I had a good mind-picture of 
what one ought to look like, and she fitted it to a T. 
So I felt at home right away. 

“Sit down, Sonny, and tell me about yourself,” 
said the old lady. “Are you and your dog just visit- 



37 


Chapter Five 

ing in the neighborhood, or do you plan to settle 
down and farm hereabouts?” I knew, of course, 
that she was just joking with me, but I didn’t mind 
that at all, because she wasn’t the kind to make 
her jokes sting. They were just her way of being 
friendly. So I smiled right back at her, and told 
her that Andy and I were just traveling through 
on our way to Missouri, that we had slept in one 
of her barns, and that I wanted to pay for Andy’s 
breakfast and to buy some for myself, if I could. 
“We’re not tramps,” I said. 

“Goodness, gracious, no!” she said. “I can tell a 
tramp, boy, man or dog as far as I see one.” She 
ran all her wrinkles together into one smile as she 
said that, and I liked her even better than I had. 
Then she told me that it was long past their break¬ 
fast time, but that, perhaps, she could hunt up a 
snack for me. 

“Could you do with bread, milk and a piece of 
pie?” she asked me. “That is, if you don’t regard 
breakfast pie as bad for the digestion. I’m from 
Connecticut, myself, and I stick to the old ways, 
though I’ve lived here since long before the city 
came so far out. Ours is the only farm left this 
close in now. Coming back to the subject of pie 
for breakfast, though, all I’ve got to say is that 
I’m sixty-six and it hasn’t killed me yet. You may 



38 


Me and Andy 


decide for yourself; though perhaps you’d like to 
look at the pie before you pass any opinion.” 

“I’d like some pie,” I answered, and told her that 
having it for breakfast struck me as a very fine 
idea, although I’d never had the opportunity to try 
it before. “How much will it be?” I asked her, for 
I knew that I must be pretty careful of my money. 

“Why, I couldn’t think of charging a friend for 
just a few victuals,” said she. “I’ve never sold 
anything to eat in my life, except, of course, at 
our church bazaar. I just do little favors for my 
friends, and they do little favors for me. For in¬ 
stance, if you can spare the time, Fd be glad to 
have you turn the churn for me a while, after 
you’ve had your breakfast. My son usually does 
it, but he’s hauling shelled corn today.” So we 
agreed on that, and then I sat down to the table 
and just filled up to the very top on milk and bread 
and pie. I was sort of ashamed to eat so much, 
and I wouldn’t have done so, hungry as I was, if 
she hadn’t claimed that she’d feel hurt if I stopped 
while I had room for any more. 

But, no matter how hungry you are, you’re sure 
to get filled, if you eat long enough. So by and by, 
when I could hold no more, I stopped eating and 
helped Mrs. May (that was the lady’s name) bring 



Chapter Five _89 

in the churn from the little shed at the west end 
of the kitchen. 

I’d never seen a churn before, and maybe you 
never have; so I’ll tell you that this one was a little 
barrel that stood between two legs and was cranked 
like an automobile; only it had no engine, and so 
would stop as soon as you quit cranking. There 
was a little door that unscrewed in one end of the 
churn, and that was where she put in the milk; 
though it wasn’t milk, but cream and so thick that 
it would hardly run. Then she screwed the little 
door shut, and let me turn the crank, which I did 
for almost an hour, and learned that there’s nothing 
like turning a churn to settle you down after a 
heavy meal. You don’t feel one-half so full after 
the first ten minutes. 

But you can turn a churn and talk at the same 
time, if you have anyone there to talk to, which I 
had, for Mrs. May made me tell about myself and 
about Andy, and all about where we’d lived and 
were going and why. When I told her about Behnke 
and the rabbits, she laughed, but when I told her 
about losing Dad, she came over and stood by me 
and brushed the hair back out of my eyes. I didn’t 
say anything more just then, either, but kept on 
turning the churn until the butter was ready to 



40 


Me and Andy 


take out. Then Mrs. May unscrewed the little 
door in the end of the churn. The butter, which 
was floating around in the butter-milk, she skimmed 
out and put into a big, wooden bowl; then worked 
it around and around with a little wooden shovel 
that was bored all over with holes. She squeezed 
out all the loose milk from it in that way, and she 
also put in some salt. “There’s been many a worse 
batch of butter than this,” she said, “if I do say 
so myself, as oughtn’t.” She was dead right about 
that, too, for she gave me some on some of her 
bread, and it was licking good, I can tell you. I 
also drank some of the buttermilk, and was sur¬ 
prised to find that I liked it. Then, after Mrs. May 
had scalded out the churn, we set it out on the 
porch where the sun could shine right into it for 
a while. 

By that time it was past ten o’clock; so Mrs. May 
wrapped up a package of lunch for me and Andy. 
Then we said good-bye, and started out again on 
the road to Missouri, first stopping at the barn 
for the satchel and the fiddle. I’ve never seen Mrs. 
May since that morning, but I’m going back again 
some day and visit with her. 




CHAPTER SIX 



GREAT many things that I tell you of, as 


l\ though I’d noticed them as I went along, I 
really never thought much about for some time 
after. I reckon, though, that most of us are a 
bit that way, when we’re talking over what we 
remember; it’s awfully hard for us to tell what 
part we really saw, or heard, or felt at the time it 
happened and what we got by putting two and two 
together. Lots of times, I know that I see some¬ 
thing without particularly noticing it, and then 
later when it’s gone, I notice it when it isn’t there 
to see. That sounds horribly jumbled up, but I 
guess you can understand it just as well as though 
I had it straight, and maybe better. 

I know it was that way with me about the man 
I met at the golf club, where Andy and I stopped, 
two or three hours after we’d left Mrs. May’s house. 
There was any number of things about him that 
should have shown me at a glance that he was 
bad medicine and wasn’t to be trusted, but I never 
noticed any of them until I was in and out of 
trouble and had left the place. That ought to 
make me make up my mind to do my noticing in 
advance, and so avoid bother, but it doesn’t. I 


41 


42 


Me and Andy 


don’t make good resolutions very often any more, 
because I’ve quite a stock of them on hand that 
I’ve never as yet been able to live up to. Most 
folks have, I guess. 

The golf club I’m telling about was about five 
or six miles farther out from the city than Mrs. 
May’s home was. It was a very scrumptious place 
with big stone gate posts that had brass plates on 
them. The posts were even finer than the ones 
the real-estate men put up before they start selling 
lots, and they were put up more solidly too. There 
was also another sign besides these brass ones. It 
was just a paper one tacked to a board and it said, 
“Caddies Wanted, Permanent; must be over six¬ 
teen.” 

Well, I was only fourteen, and I was on my way 
to Missouri, but I’ve always made it a point to be 
as permanent as I know how to be; so I saw no 
harm in going in to see whether there might not 
be a chance to earn a bit of money by stopping off 
and caddying for a while. I was going to offer 
to work until they got some regular caddies, if 
they’d let me do so. The sign had said to apply 
to Mr. Brown at the caddy-shed, and while I was 
making my way up the gravel path that ran along 
the cement driveway, I was making up a nice little 
speech to say to him so that he would be glad to 



Chapter Six 


43 


hire me. All of which goes to show how much it 
sometimes pays to make plans. I was as much 
out of luck as the fellow who spent all his Satur¬ 
day afternoons at the poor farm, playing checkers 
with the paupers, so as to have friends in the 
place when he got so old he’d have to go there, and 
then died the week after he inherited a million 
dollars. Of course that has nothing to do with 
what happened to me at the golf club. I just said 
it now for fear I wouldn’t remember it later. 

Anyway, I went up the path until I came to the 
caddy-shed, which was over behind the club house 
and just a few feet from the place where folks 
started out to play. I knew it was the caddy-shed, 
all right, for there were a half dozen fellows my 
age or a bit older loafing on a bench in front of 
the place, and waiting their turn at caddying. 

Perhaps I did look peculiar, walking along with 
a fiddle in one hand, and a satchel in the other, 
and followed by a big, shaggy dog; so it was all 
right for them to laugh at me. But it was all 
wrong for one of them to say “Sic ’em,” to the 
white bull-terrier that was lying beside the bench; 
not that I was in the least afraid for Andy, for 
he weighs eighty-eight pounds, and is all dog, able 
to take care of himself and me too; but I don’t 
like him to fight, and he never does fight, unless 



44 


Me and Andy 


some other dog picks on him. Even then, I can 
stop the fight, so far as Andy is concerned, if the 
other fellow will do as much with his dog. 

That’s what I supposed Mr. Brown the caddy- 
master, who was standing right there, would do. 
So, when the bull-terrier started for Andy, I just 
dropped my luggage and took hold of Andy’s collar 
to do my part in preventing the fight, though I 
ought to have known by one look at Mr. Brown’s 
face that the decent thing was j'ust what he 
wouldn’t do. You see, he was one of those men 
whose eyes are not quite the same color, and the 
two sides of whose faces are enough different to 
be noticed, one ear being a bit larger and lower 
down than the other. Maybe some such men are 
to be trusted, but not by me. At any rate, Mr. 
Brown did not even try to call off his dog. I saw 
that the fight couldn’t be avoided then, but in some 
way I’d got my fingers caught in Andy’s collar. 
So I tried to get between the two dogs for a second, 
and, as a result of that, the terrier crashed straight 
into me, dogs, boy, satchel and fiddle-case rolling 
on the ground together; no wonder then that the 
terrier got hold of my arm instead of Andy’s throat. 

That was mighty hard luck for that terrier, 
though, for I yelled out with the pain, and Andy 
wasn’t a dog any more; he was twenty fighting 




Chapter Six 


45 


lions rolled up in one dog-hide. There was one roar 
from Andy, a sort of scream from the bull-terrier, 
and by the time I could scramble to my feet, the 
terrier was lying ten feet away with his legs twitch¬ 
ing. Andy had broken his neck. But, in another 
second, Andy was stretched out, too, for Mr. Brown 
had rushed up and struck him as hard as he could 
with an iron golf-club. 

I went plumb crazy then, and I rushed at Mr. 
Brown, striking and kicking at him, but he merely 
laughed in a nasty way and gave me one slap with 
his open hand that sent me flying as though I hadn’t 
weighed more than a pound and a half. It certainly 
does make a fellow feel angry and helpless, when 
he’s past fourteen and most grown up, to find that 
a mean man can still throw him around like that. 
Right then, I put that man on the same list as 
Behnke, the butcher. I was going to whip him when 
I grew up. What made me maddest of all was that 
all those caddies fairly roared with laughter to see 
me swatted that way. I don’t suppose that they 
were really bad fellows at all, but they’d been mean, 
and they knew it; so now they were trying to show 
that they didn’t care. Besides, Mr. Brown hired 
and fired the caddies, and it wouldn’t have paid one 
of them to let him see that what he did was thought 
low-down. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve pre- 




46 


Me and Andy 


tended that I didn’t care, myself, when down inside 
of me I was as ashamed of myself as I could be. 
I must have realized that in a way at that time, for 
all my anger was at Mr. Brown and not at those 
boys. 

But I didn’t say anything to Mr. Brown then, for 
there was nothing to say. All I could do was to 
pick up old Andy and carry him away with me, 
leaving my fiddle-case and satchel there on the 
ground, where they had fallen. I wouldn’t have 
thought of leaving my dog lying there like an alley 
cur shot for mad by some thick-headed policeman. 
So I turned away from them all, and went over to 
Andy. 

And then, all of a sudden, my slapped face and 
bitten arm stopped hurting. For, as I reached out 
my hand to slip it under Andy’s head, the fine old 
fellow put out his tongue and licked my fingers. He 
had only been stunned and, though his poor old head 
was badly cut from that terrible blow with the golf- 
iron, I could see in a moment that he was coming 
around all right. In a few minutes more he was up 
on his feet, but the fight was pretty well out of him 
for the time being, and he slunk close to my legs, 
as I picked up my things and started back down the 
path towards the road. 

To tell the truth, I wasn’t feeling any too chipper 



Chapter Six 


47 


myself, for, besides a nasty dog-bite in my arm, my 
hands and knees were badly scratched up from my 
roll in the gravel of the pathway, and my pants and 
stockings pretty much torn. My face had begun to 
ache again, too, from the slap I’d had. But, at that, 
we hadn’t come out as badly as we might have done, 
which was more than could be said for Mr. Brown’s 
terrier, which was as dead as it ever would be. So 
I strutted a little, as we went down the path, in 
order to let them know that we were leaving, but 
not licked. I’d have whistled, too, but my face hurt 
too much. 

But, when we had come clear of the golf grounds 
and had gone down the road a little piece, both of 
us were glad to rest beside a big creek that came out 
from the grounds and flowed under a bridge. We 
stretched out there in the shade of that bridge, and 
I wet my handkerchief in the creek in order to wash 
the dirt from our cuts. Then I plastered them with 
nice, blue clay which is fine for hurt places, as any 
dog knows, but most people don’t. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 


I READ one time in the Sunday paper, about a 
fellow, who was thrown from his horse and 
landed so hard on his head that he found a gold¬ 
mine, and so was rich and famous ever after. I used 
to believe that story, but since I’ve started out to 
authorize this book I’ve had my doubts about its 
being quite true. More than a dozen times, I’ve had 
to scratch out something that almost seemed to put 
itself on the paper, just because there didn’t happen 
to be a word of truth in it, and the worst of it has 
been that those were the most interesting things of 
all. A lot of interesting things never happened, I 
guess. But that gold-mine story might be partly 
true, at that, for I was dog-bitten and gravel-rolled 
into a piece of good luck. 

You see, if I hadn’t been bitten and scratched like 
that, I probably wouldn’t have stopped at that creek 
to patch myself with blue clay, and then I’d not have 
been on hand, when the little, fat man came up and 
tried to drive his golf-ball across the water. 

The creek was pretty large for a creek, but away 
too small ever to have any real hope of becoming a' 
river, being just about a hundred feet across, but it 
might as well have been the Atlantic Ocean for all 


48 


Chapter Seven 


49 


the good it did that fellow to try and shoot over it. 
He just kept putting ball after ball upon little sand- 
piles, and then whanging away with first one stick 
and then another, but the only improvement he 
made was in changing to balls that floated instead 
of sinking. He kept at it with that kind of balls 
until he had the water along the edge of the dam 
looking as though it was Hallowe’en and he was 
getting ready to bob for crab-apples. 

Every time his ball went into the water, that fat 
little man would jump up and down, and would cuss 
something terrible. Once he said that it was a lucky 
thing for the man that invented the game that he 
was dead, because otherwise he’d certainly kill him 
himself. Then he cussed some more. I never had 
noticed before what a fool a fellow sounds like when 
he gets mad and takes it out in swearing. I could 
have told the man that, but I didn’t. Somehow, I 
didn’t think it would be likely to do him any good. 
So I just sat there under my bridge, and looked out 
at him, until he ran out of golf balls and cuss-words. 

When that happened, the little fat man got so 
mad that he threw the club he’d used last so hard 
it went clear over the fence and slid across to the 
road, bringing up under the bridge almost at my 
feet. I think he had really intended to throw the 
club into the water, but was so angry that he tried 



50 


Me and Andy. 


to hurl it with too much force, and so couldn’t con¬ 
trol it any better than he had his golf-shots. Any¬ 
how, it wasn’t my club; so I picked it up and went 
over to the fence to give it to him. He was so mad 
still, though, that he wouldn’t take it. 

“You can have the fool thing, and all the rest of 
this trash, too, if you’re idiot enough to want it,” he 
yelled. “I’m off this pasture-pool for life and I’ll 
never touch a club again, unless it’s to use one on 
the next doctor that orders me to play the game.” 
Then he seemed to get good-natured all of a sudden, 
for he grinned at me and said, “I’m pretty rotten at 
golf, eh Sonny?” I supposed then that, being over 
his angry spell, he’d go back on giving me his clubs, 
but he didn’t. He held the bag out towards me, and 
said, “Better take your trash, Sonny, before I lose 
my mind again and decide to play some more.” 

Now, I already had all the things I wanted to 
carry, and I had as much use for golf-clubs as 
Andy’d have for snowshoes, but a present is some¬ 
thing for nothing, and so when people offer me one, 
I most generally take it. I’m different that way, 
you know. 

“Are those golf-balls floating out there in the 
water mine, too?” I asked him, and he said that they 
were. So I told Andy to fetch them, and he did, 



Chapter Seven 


51 


bringing them in one at a time. There were nine 
of them and almost all of them were brand new, but 
the little man didn’t seem sorry he’d given them to 
me. He made a big fuss over Andy, too, and said 
he’d never seen a smarter dog; so seeing that we 
were so popular with him, I asked if it was all right 
for me to shoot a few balls across the water. 

“Why not?” said he. “My golf expense ends to¬ 
day, and the worst they can do is to charge me a 
guest fee. Go right ahead. Then he grinned again 
and stuck out his hand to me to shake. “My name 
is Smith,” he said, “and I like to know the names 
of my guests. What’s yours?” So I told him and 
we shook hands. Then I made a whole row of those 
little sand-piles, and put a ball on top of each one. 
After I’d felt over all nine of the clubs in the bag, 
I ran across one that just seemed to fit my hands. 
It waggled just right; I’d played enough games of 
shinny to know that. So I stepped up and hit the 
first ball with it. 

I was still stiff and sore from the rough treat¬ 
ment that I’d had only an hour or two before, but at 
that my shot was too good, for that ball sailed over 
the water and then travelled about two hundred feet 
more. For that reason, I didn’t hit quite so hard 
after that, and the next three balls went right onto 



52 


Me and Andy 


the green and stayed there, which got Mr. Smith all 
excited. He grabbed the club out of my hands and, 
you may believe it or not, he shot a ball across 
almost as well as I could have done myself. Not only 
that, but he did the same thing twice more. 

Tickled? Say, he was so happy and excited that 
he almost danced the Charleston. He was so proud 
of himself that he strutted around with his chest 
stuck out almost as far as his stomach, which was 
a good way. He decided right then to take up golf 
again, and made me an offer of two dollars for my 
outfit. Probably I could have had more for it, but 
since it hadn’t cost me anything, I saw no reason to 
charge him more than that. He was a very nice 
man, and offered me another dollar to stay and 
caddy for him, but I’d seen too much of the sort of 
caddies they had around there to want to be one of 
them. 

Besides, it was after half-past three and more 
than time for me and Andy to be on our way to 
Missouri. All-in-all, it hadn’t been such a bad 
day. I’d been dog-bitten and gravelled, but I’d 
learned to play golf and to make butter, and was 
two dollars to the good besides. If Mr. Brown, the 
caddy-master, had come along then the day would 
have been perfect. I wanted to thumb my nose at 



























Chapter Seven 


53 


him before I left there for good. So I just pre¬ 
tended he was there, and did it anyhow, first mak¬ 
ing sure that Mr. Smith was out of sight, as I 
didn’t want him to think I wasn’t being polite. 




CHAPTER EIGHT 

i I GUESS I told you, Andy and I had started 



r\ out with the idea of walking a good big dis¬ 
tance every day; perhaps even as much as twenty 
or twenty-five miles. Doing that would have 
brought us to the edge of Missouri in three weeks 
at the most, and then I figured I’d have a look at 
all the towns there were down there, until I ran 
across the one where my grandfather lived. All I 
knew about the place was that it was a small town 
of about one thousand people. 

Now, I know that a fellow, who’d start out that 
way with no more notion of where he was going 
than I had, and without even brains enough to real¬ 
ize that he would have to spend at least twenty 
years of his life wandering around in order to visit 
all the small towns in a big state like Missouri, 
must seem like a plumb idiot to you. But, you see, 
I’d never have been more than five or six miles 
from my own back door in Chicago in all my life, 
except possibly three or four times. All I knew 
about states was what I’d learned in Geography, 
and that was very little. So it must have been at 
least four weeks before I began to worry much 


54 


Chapter Eight 


55 


about my being able to do what I’d started out to 
get done. 

It didn’t take me that long, though, to realize 
that I wasn’t going to do any twenty-five miles a 
day, for night-time of my second day on the road 
found me only about twenty miles from our old 
place in Chicago, and stumbling along in the dark 
just as I had done the night before. There were 
about as many automobiles to turn out for as there’d 
been the night before, too, and, what with all I’d 
been through that day, I was even tireder. Take 
it altogether, though, it hadn’t been such a bad day 
for me, for I’d made two friends, even if I might 
never happen to see either of them again. Besides, 
I’d learned to play golf and to make butter, and a 
fellow can never tell when knowledge like that is 
going to come in handy. Another besides was that 
I was two dollars richer at night than I had been 
in the morning. 

Perhaps I’d have been fairly happy that night, if 
it hadn’t been for two or three small things. One 
of them was that I’d had nothing to eat for about 
eight hours, and so was hungry again. Another 
was that there was a hole in one of my stockings, 
and it had rubbed a blister on my big toe; still an¬ 
other was that it had begun to rain, not hard, but 
with a misty, moisty drizzle that dripped off of my 



56 


Me and Andy 


cap and ran down the back of ray neck. Between 
times of meeting automobiles, it was terribly dark, 
too, and I kept wishing that I had a lantern or a 
flash-light, though my hands were full enough as it 
was. What I needed right then was either three 
hands and a lantern, or else a good twenty-five cent 
restaurant that was fitted out with a first-class 
hay-mow. 

Of course, I didn’t hope to find a restaurant that 
had a hay-mow, but I did keep on hoping that I’d 
find both the restaurant and the hay-mow, and that 
it wouldn’t be too far from the one to the other. 
So I kept plugging along, looking about me from 
time to time for a place either to eat or to sleep. 
Of places to eat I saw a plenty, but they were not 
for me, since they were road-houses. Road-houses 
are country restaurants for city people who have 
time, money and automobiles, and they charge what¬ 
ever you have with you just for one little sandwich. 
I’d never been inside one of these places, and I 
haven’t been there yet, but I’d read the newspapers 
enough to know that my eight dollars wouldn’t last 
long in one of them. I didn’t think that any sand¬ 
wich in the world was worth my eight dollars. 
Besides, Andy was as hungry as I was. 

There was nothing for me to do except to keep 
on rambling down that road, and I did so until I 



Chapter Eight 


57 


came to a place where it forked. Most of the cars 
were taking the right-hand fork, but I’d heard that 
the surest way to be right is to do what other folks 
don’t. Then too, the left-hand fork went south¬ 
west, which was the way I wanted to go, anyhow. 
It certainly is fine, when what you ought to do and 
what you want to do are the same thing. It ought 
to happen that way a good deal oftener than it does. 

But even the road you want and ought to take 
may turn out to be no road at all, as I found out 
that night, for in less than two miles the concrete 
petered out into the measliest mud I ever set a foot 
into. Every step I took, my shoes went, “squash, 
squash” as they sank, while each time that I pulled 
one out of the mush there was a sound such as chew¬ 
ing gum makes, when you pop it. Finally, my left 
shoe-string broke and the shoe came off; so that I 
had the fun of standing on one foot in the mud, 
tying the string together and putting a muddy shoe 
back on a still muddier foot. I know now why peo¬ 
ple sometimes call feet, “mud-hooks”; it’s because 
that’s just what they are. 

In some ways, Andy had a big advantage over 
me, for he had no load to carry, and he knew how 
to run along on the top of a rut for a little way at 
a time. But he found it pretty hard going, at that, 
and every little while he’d stop and whine, as much 



58 


Me and Andy 


as to say, “Are we going to keep this up all night?” 
which was just exactly what I was wondering my¬ 
self. But I needn’t have worried about him, for 
when a rabbit popped out of some bushes and did 
a Nurmi down the side of the road, Andy came to 
life at once, and went after that animal, hot as a 
griddle and yelping at every jump. There’s noth¬ 
ing that cures a dog’s discouragement as well as a 
right good rabbit chase. You’d never have known 
that Andy had been tired at all. 

That affair increased my respect for Andy a lot, 
too, because he’d probably never seen a live rabbit 
in his life; yet he knew just what a dog ought to 
do when one turned up. That’s instinct, I suppose, 
and it’s a great deal handier to have than brains, 
because it can always be counted upon, while brains 
are likely to go back on you just when you have 
most need of their help. I know, for I have brains 
myself. Anyhow, Andy’s instinct was a great help 
to us both that night, because the rabbit turned off 
the road and holed-in under a hay-stack. By fol¬ 
lowing the sound of Andy’s wild yelps, I located the 
place, and finally managed to quiet him down, but 
not until he’d torn out almost enough hay to make 
us a bed for the night. Andy was terribly dis¬ 
appointed about losing that rabbit, but he finally 
decided to crawl in with me under the hay. 



Chapter Eight 


59 


My old satchel didn’t make such an awfully bad 
pillow that night and the overhang of the hay-stack, 
made by the cattle eating into it, was as good a 
roof as a fellow ought to ask. Even the water my 
clothes had soaked up was a help and not a hin¬ 
drance, for, when we’d got ourselves snuggled down 
into the hay for a while, we steamed up so well I 
had to throw off some of our covering. We were 
right snug and comfortable, although a meal would 
have been useful. It’s a good idea, when you’re 
tramping it, to get your supper before dark; other¬ 
wise you may do without. This was my second les¬ 
son in that, and I can say that I’ve never needed 
the third. 

However, there’s good in everything; even in go¬ 
ing to bed hungry; it’s the one certain way to be 
around on time in the morning and with a good 
healthy appetite for breakfast. So I was up with 
the sun, and feeling pretty chipper, although a bit 
stiff and sore, especially in my bitten arm. But 
even that was much better, thanks to the blue clay; 
so I decided that I wasn’t going to have hydro¬ 
phobia, which was a great relief, but not as much 
so as it would have been, if I had ever really 
thought so. 

But hungry? Say, you don’t know what hunger 
is. I almost wished myself a cow, so that I might 



60 


Me and Andy 


fill up on hay, and if someone had come along then 
and offered me four good breakfasts at two dollars 
each, I’d have bought all of them, and would have 
been broke but happy. 

Now, the very best thing to do when you’re hun¬ 
gry is to look about you for something to eat, and 
that’s just what I did right then. It paid, too, for 
in less than a minute my eyes fell on what, at first, 
looked to be a white stone, but turned out to be a 
big lump of pressed salt. Well, salt is food, even 
though you can’t very well eat it straight; so I 
decided to lay in my salt first, and then look around 
for the rest of my breakfast. The outside of the 
lump had been pretty well cow and calf-licked, but 
the inside hadn’t been licked on at all, as far as I 
was able to tell. So I bored a hole with my knife, 
and in a few minutes had as much salt as I’d need 
for a week. I put it in an old arithmetic paper that 
I found in my pocket. The paper was only marked 
fifty-five, but it was good enough to hold salt. 

Well, having plenty of salt on hand, I spent a 
few minutes thinking of as many kinds of food as 
I could that would be good with salt. There was 
an awfully long list of them, but the only kind that 
was handy was beef-steak, which I couldn’t use, 
because the cows were still wearing it. Besides, 
they weren’t my cows. I wouldn’t have minded 



Chapter Eight 


61 


picking up an apple, if it had been that time of 
year, but a cow seemed, somehow, different. A fel¬ 
low can’t be too careful about things like that. 
Lots of men, I bet, have started out by just tak¬ 
ing a cow, or a sack of flour, or some little thing 
like that and have ended up by becoming really 
dishonest. 

I was about to start in at pretending that I 
wasn’t hungry enough to make eating breakfast at 
all worth while, when my eye lit on an old night- 
crawler, who’d been out late, and was just wiggling 
his way home. “Night-crawlers are angle-worms; 
angle-worms are bait; bait is used to catch fish, and 
I have a fishing line with me,” said I to myself. 
“All I need is a pole, a lake, and a little luck, and 
the breakfast question will settle itself.” The pole 
was a poplar branch that I cut from a tree in that 
pasture, the lake was a quarry-hole half a mile fur¬ 
ther down the road and the luck was there wait¬ 
ing for me. 

Nobody knows how fish get into old quarry-holes 
way out in the country, but they often do, and this 
particular quarry-hole was fairly alive with little 
perch and sun-fish about five or six inches long. So 
I went to work at them, and inside of fifteen min¬ 
utes my angle-worm was all worn out, while I had 
six mighty fine little fish. 



62 


Me and Andy 


I’d have had to quit fishing then for lack of bait, 
if Nature hadn’t built perch without any family 
feelings. They’re cannibals, and would as soon 
lunch on a bite of perch-meat as on anything else, 
which is a great help to fishermen, and serves the 
fish right for being so unmoral. Nature is very 
just about things like that, I’ve noticed. 

I certainly had a fine time at that quarry-hole 
that morning, while the fishing lasted, which must 
have been more than an hour. Then they quit bit¬ 
ing, which was all right with me, for, if they never 
quit, a fellow might starve, because he had no time 
to stop and eat them. As it was, I felt pretty proud, 
as I laid my fifty-three little fish all in a row on 
the grass, and I bragged a bit to Andy about them. 
“Now,” said I, “we’ll have a regular breakfast.” 
You see, it hadn’t occurred to me at all yet that, in 
order to cook fish, people usually had a frying-pan 
and some butter or lard. It always surprises me, 
when I find out how dumb I can be. 

But, after I’d stood there helpless for a few min¬ 
utes, I said to myself, “You can just bet that Buf¬ 
falo Bill, or The Deerslayer, or Long John Silver 
would never have starved to death for lack of a 
little, old frying-pan. They’d have invented some 
new way to cook fish.” So I put my mind to work 
at finding a plan to cook my breakfast, while my 



Chapter Eight 


63 


hands were busy at getting it ready to cook, for 
there’s no use in wasting your time when you’re 
thinking. You can think just as well, while you’re 
doing some kinds of work, as you can when you’re 
idle. 

I went ahead, thinking and fish-cleaning, and, 
sure enough, by the time I was ready to cook my 
fish, I had worked out a way of doing it. I got 
my idea from remembering a picture in The Sup¬ 
plementary Reading Book, which showed where 
some Indians had strung a lot of fish on switches, 
and had put them in the sun to dry. Of course, I 
couldn’t wait six months for my breakfast; so dry¬ 
ing my fish that way was out of the question, but 
a bit of fire under them would hurry them along, 
cooking being a lot like drying, but faster. So I 
rubbed some of my salt into a dozen of those fish, 
strung them on a willow switch, and hung the 
switch-load of fish across two notched sticks that 
I’d driven into the ground. Then I built a fire un¬ 
der them. The first switch-full of fish burned up, 
because I let the flame strike them, but from then 
on I kept the fire down to hot coals, and the rest 
were perfect, though awfully hot. 

Andy couldn’t help any with the cooking, but he 
was right on hand when it came to the eating; some 
dogs won’t touch fish, but Andy has sense, you 



64 


Me <md Andy 


know. So he waded right into his meal, and I did 
the same. In an hour, we were both too full of 
broiled fish and fresh quarry-hole water to move 
comfortably. So we stretched out in the sun and 
took a nap until almost noon. Then we went swim¬ 
ming. It was a very nice way to spend the morning. 




CHAPTER NINE 


HE very commonest sort of days is the sort 



when nothing happens. Some weeks have 


seven days of that sort, while others have only four, 
or five or six, but I never yet have lived through 
a week that hadn’t any. You’d scarcely think that 
you’d run into that kind of days when you were 
travelling through the country on foot, and with a 
fine dog for company, but you’d be surprised, for 
you’d find more days like that than you would have 
done if you’d stayed home. 

Days like that, a fellow just plugs, plugs along 
down the road between two lines of barbed-wire 
fence put there to herd him in where he belongs, 
and passes farm after farm, each just like the 
others, if not more so. Nothing is there to catch 
his interest, and it’s just as well that there isn’t, 
for he wouldn’t be interested anyhow. His dog, if 
he has one, seems to feel the same way about things, 
too, for instead of zigzagging back and forth across 
the road, and trying to nose out something to chase, 
he keeps lagging behind, and is always looking for 
an excuse to lie down and rest. You’d do it your¬ 
self, if it weren’t that there’s not even anything 
worth being tired about. 


65 


66 


Me <md Andy 


On some such days, there’s a fine, misty rain 
falling, not enough to wet you clean through in a 
few minutes, but a plenty to make a good thorough 
job of it by the time you are ready to hole-up for 
the night; and if there’s anything more wretched 
than sleeping, night after night, in wet clothes, I’ll 
let you have my turn at it, and say that you’re 
quite welcome. 

Such days are lonely, too. When you are in real 
trouble, you’re never lonely; you’re as interested in 
yourself as Andy is, when he has a flea working on 
him in a place he can’t reach to scratch, and you 
keep on feeling sorrier and sorrier for yourself, 
until at last you are so miserable that you are hav¬ 
ing a perfectly wonderful time. Then your troubles 
are at least half-way over. 

But there’s one good thing to be said for the plug- 
along days. You get over a good deal of ground 
on them. I know, for I had about a dozen of them 
in a row, right after that morning at the quarry- 
hole; and I managed to cover almost ninety miles, 
without seeing anything that it would be worth 
your while to hear about. My meals I bought at 
little road-side eating-stands and I was pretty ex¬ 
travagant, I guess, for I found myself, on the morn¬ 
ing of my fifteenth day after leaving home, with 



Chapter Nine 


67 


only two dollars and fifteen cents. I’d spent about 
thirty-five cents a day. 

My stockings were worn out, too, both pairs of 
them, and my shoes had said good-bye to most of 
their soles, but May had got well started by then, 
and May isn’t any too early to begin going bare¬ 
foot, especially when you don’t own any shoes. 
Going bare-foot is the quickest way there is to 
toughen the soles of your feet. So I threw away 
what was left of my shoes and stockings, and felt 
better right away. I’d have been able to buy a pair 
of rubber-soled canvas shoes for my two dollars, but 
that meant doing without about twenty sandwiches, 
and I much prefer sandwiches to shoes, when the 
weather is warm. 

But not even twenty sandwiches are a great deal 
of food for a fourteen-year-old boy and a two-year- 
old dog, who are healthy and have several hundred 
miles of traveling to do. So, after thinking the 
matter over for a while, I decided that it would be 
a good idea for us to find some sort of a job, and 
earn some money, before going ahead on our way 
to Missouri. I put the idea straight-up to Andy, 
and he answered it with two short, sharp barks, 
which is his way of saying, “Suits me.” Then I 
went to job-hunting. 

I’d had a notion that all I’d have to do would be 



68 


Me and Andy 


to walk into some farmer’s door-yard and ask him 
for a job, and that I’d find work at the first, or at 
worst the second place that I called, but I found 
myself mighty badly fooled. Some said that I was 
too young and too green to be of any use on a farm; 
others offered to have me arrested as a runaway 
boy; and still others just naturally wouldn’t hire 
a hand of any age, if he owned a dog. They claimed 
that strange dogs would tree their cats, chase their 
cattle, and kill their sheep and chickens. Of course, 
I explained to them that Andy didn’t have any of 
those habits except that of treeing cats, but my talk 
did no good at all. They didn’t want to believe me. 
Only one fellow offered me a job. 

That one said that, if we’d stay all summer, he’d 
feed us and let us sleep in his hay-loft, and that 
when fall came he’d give me some old clothes and 
ten dollars. I figured that, if his old clothes were 
no better than the ones he was wearing, I’d be as 
well off without them, but it didn’t seem polite to 
say so; so I didn’t. Just to give the place a trial, 
I agreed to saw wood for my dinner, and the farmer 
took me over to his wood-pile. That was the poor¬ 
est bargain I ever made, for the saw-buck was 
rickety, and the saw was rickety, too. Besides, it 
was so dull that each length of wood I cut was good 
for a new blister, although I’d thought my hands 



Chapter Nine 


69 


pretty well calloused already from carrying my 
satchel and fiddle-case. I certainly was glad, when 
the farmer’s wife came out and called me to come 
in and wash-up for dinner. 



But, hungry as I was, I’d about as soon have kept 
on sawing with a rusty saw, as to put in my time at 
a dinner such as that one, for all that they had to 
eat was turnip-greens and pancakes that had been 
mixed with water, instead of with eggs and milk. 
There wasn’t any butter for the pancakes, either, 
because they sold all their milk to the creamery. 



































70 


Me and Andy 


The woman told me that, and she said, too, that the 
reason she made her syrup so thin was that it 
wasn’t so sticky that way. 

When dinner was over, the woman let me help 
with the dishes, which didn’t take as long as it 
should have done, as she was very saving of soap. 
All in all, I figured that I’d be as well off starving 
to death without a job as with one, and I was sure 
Andy felt the same way about the matter, for he 
very soon gave up the idea of trying to get any 
meat off of the bone they gave him. So I thanked 
the farmer for his offer of a job, and was on my 
way. If I intended to stay dirt-poor all my life, 
‘which I don’t, I’d be that way in the city. A fel¬ 
low’s appetite is too good out in the country. 

But, at that, I was ahead of the game by having 
stopped at that place, for I’d learned that a fellow 
can work for his meals, and still keep on traveling. 
So, when night ended that day, I’d earned my sup¬ 
per and Andy’s too, as well as the right to sleep in 
a regular bed, by helping a farmer feed and water 
his stock. That bed was so comfortable that at 
first I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, 
but I managed it all right and slept hard, too. I 
didn’t need any alarm clock though. The farmer 
had one. They get up awfully early on farms, I 



Chapter Nine 


71 


found, and they work hard, as I already knew, but 
there is a big difference in the way they feed you 
at different ones. I know, for I’ve tried both kinds 
the same day. 




CHAPTER TEN 


I SUPPOSE that I ought to be ashamed to admit 
it, but I got to like the life I was leading by 
the time that I’d been hiking with Andy for about 
three weeks. There was nothing to worry about; 
nothing to do for anyone except ourselves, for I 
had to work very little in order to get what we 
needed. Three days out of five, I did no work at 
all, and some days I didn’t even bother to travel. 

As soon as it was dark, I would camp for the 
night in some sheltered place, with my head stuck 
through the bottom of some old gunny-sacks a fel¬ 
low at a country grain-elevator had given me, and 
would go to sleep with my feet towards the coals 
of the little fire where I’d cooked our supper. That 
is, of course, I camped out that way, when I was 
reasonably sure that it wasn’t going to rain, and I 
slept very comfortably, too, for I’d learned to scoop 
out a place in the ground for my hips and another 
for my shoulders. 

At dawn, I was awake, and listening to the chat¬ 
ter of the birds and the squirrels, while I rubbed 
my eyes to get the sleepiness out of them. Then 
I’d get up, stretch myself to get rid of the stiff 
places in my arms and legs, wash, if water was 


72 


Chapter Ten 


73 


handy, and my day was begun. When I came to a 
place where there looked to be good fishing, I fished, 
if I felt like it, and if the fish chose not to bite, that 
was their business and not mine. I was getting 
pretty tired of eating fish, anyhow. 

Almost every afternoon, I went in swimming at 
some quiet place away from the road, and Andy 
always went in with me. The water was usually 
rather cold, but we’d got hardened to it by now, 
and enjoyed it. Besides, we could always get warm 
as soon as we came out, just by lying around in the 
sunshine. At first, I got badly sunburned, but that 
soon wore off, and I got to be about as brown all 
over as a white boy could very well get. I guess 
we were both pretty much like tramps, for we took 
things as they came, and didn’t care a great deal 
whether we ever got to Missouri or not. 

But, in lots of ways, I was very different from 
the tramps I met. They were sneaky-eyed and 
sneaky-walking fellows, most of them, who crossed 
the road to keep from walking close to dogs. We 
didn’t do that; we walked straight ahead, giving 
half the path to anyone, man, boy or dog we met, 
and if any strange dog took a notion that the whole 
road belonged to him, he soon got over the idea. 
Andy is very convincing about little things like 
that. We never begged, as tramps do, and we never 



74 


Me <md Andy 


stole, either. When we needed anything, we bought 
it, if we had the money; when we hadn’t we did 
without, and just pretended we didn’t want any¬ 
thing, and wouldn’t until there came a chance to 
earn a little money. 

Usually, it was very hard work I did to pick up 
the small bits of cash I earned, but once I came 
across a country dance, where the fiddler hadn’t 
shown up, and, rather than have no dance, they 
gave me two dollars and all the ice-cream and cake 
that I could eat, just for playing the few tunes I 
knew. I had to play the same ones over and over 
again, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind that at 
all. They were very nice to me, too, though they 
asked too many questions; not that I had anything 
to hide, but I didn’t care to tell all about myself 
everywhere I stopped for a few hours. 

Some of the girls at the dance took a great shine 
to Andy, feeding him sandwiches as long as he 
would keep on eating. He’d never known anything 
about girls before that night, but he’s liked them 
ever since. So far, though, it hasn’t brought him 
any more sandwiches, which always seems to puz¬ 
zle him a bit. We had a very nice time at that 
dance, and after it was over, a young man and his 
wife, who were going our way, took us home with 
them to spend the night. Andy slept on the porch, 



Chapter Ten 


75 


but I had a good bed. In the morning we were both 
given a good breakfast and the man rode us as far 
as the next town, where he happened to be going 
that day. He and his wife were very nice people, 
but terribly homely. Lots of nice people are, I 
guess. 

That was the only lift we had on our whole trip, 
for we were even less like hitch-hikers than we were 
like honest-to-goodness tramps. Hitch-hikers, I 
think, are just about the cheapest animals you’ll 
find along the road. They dress up in silly-looking 
clothes, and stand beside the road, leaning on long 
sticks, and pointing with a thumb in the direction 
they want to go. They’re about nine-tenths hitch 
and one-tenth hike, and their main amusement is 
making smart-aleck remarks to each other about 
the people they meet along the way. They think a 
fellow is too dumb to know that they’re talking 
about him, I guess. Hitch-hikers are a pest, and 
when I get to own a car I’m going to whizz by every 
last one of them. 

Where Andy and I were like regular tramps was 
in our not caring to stay more than a day or two 
in one place, and in being just as well satisfied to 
sleep in a hay-barn or under the shelter of a hedge, 
as we would have been in a regular bed with sheets. 
We were like tramps, too, in not having any people 



76 


Me and Andy 


of our own, but that was no fault of ours; we’d 
have liked them, if we’d had them. I know that 
about myself, at least, and I’m sure Andy felt the 
same way, for he makes it a point to like every¬ 
body that I do. 

Sometimes, for a fact, I’d get pretty lonesome 
for someone to talk to or play with, and then I’d 
look for a country school that hadn’t closed yet. 
We’d hang around outside until recess, and then 
there’d usually be a game of one o’cat that we could 
both get into; for Andy played, too, and made a 
good outfielder. The boys were glad to have us 
join in, for those little schools had so few pupils 
that, even when they let the girls play they couldn’t 
have regular ball games, but had to stick to one or 
two o’cat. As a rule, though, Andy and I wouldn’t 
get to finish a game, because the teacher would 
notice that there was a strange boy in the yard. 
As soon as that happened, our fun was over, for she 
was pretty sure to come into the yard and ask me a 
lot of questions, most of them about things that 
were no one’s business but our own; not that I was 
ashamed of anything, but it hurt to be always tell¬ 
ing about my being an orphan, and then, on top of 
that, having my word doubted. Boys aren’t like 
that; they ask your name and tell you theirs. Then, 
if they like you, they play with you. If they hap- 



Chapter Ten 


77 


pen not to like you, they usually fight with you first, 
and then make up and play as nicely as though you 
had been friends for years. It’s a very pleasant 
way, and saves a lot of trouble. 

I couldn’t blame those country school-teachers 
much, though, for being a little bit nosey, for most 
of the schools had so few pupils that the board was 
talking about not running them another year, but 
sending the children to town school in a bus. So 
the teachers didn’t feel that they could afford to 
let any boy who lived near there escape them, even 
for the few days they had left that year. I’d have 
been glad to help one of them out by going to her 
school for a few days, if I’d had the time, but I 
hadn’t; so as soon as the teacher showed up, I got 
into the habit of picking up my satchel and fiddle- 
case, whistling for Andy, and moseying off down 
the road. That’s always a good plan when trouble 
shows up. 




CHAPTER ELEVEN 


I T WAS well into May by now, and the fruit 
trees were all in blossom. They smelled mighty 
sweet, too, and the bees were more than busy around 
them. You could lean across an old fence and hear 
them humming at their work, as if they knew that 
the honey crop wasn’t going to last long and they 
were hustling like all get-out in order to save as 
much of it as they could. It was spring along the 
roads and especially along the back roads. 

Roads are always interesing, but the back roads, 
the ordinary old dirt and turnpike ones are the most 
so, because they zig-zag and wander around a lot 
without ever really quite forgetting where they’re 
going. A road like that is right human, and you 
want to get acquainted with it and follow it to see 
where it will end. Most roads don’t end, though; 
they just run into other roads. You never wonder 
where one of these new-fangled cement roads goes; 
you know and it knows, too. It’s on its way and 
it’s mighty hard about it. When it comes to a hill, 
it goes right on over it, and maybe takes the top off 
of the hill to do it. A little thing like spoiling a 
pretty hill never bothers a cement road. But it’s a 
poor place to walk, because it just naturally wears 


Chapter Eleven 


79 


your feet out; besides keeping you forever on the 
jump, so as not to be run down by automobiles. 

There are other nice things about dirt roads, too, 
that you don’t find along the cement trail. Take 
dust, for instance. Andy and I are both mighty 
fond of walking in nice soft dust and letting it 
squash in between our toes. Mud is good that way, 
too, but it tires you more than dust does. Dust is 
mighty soothing to the feet, when it’s not too hot, 
and when your feet feel good, you most generally 
feel good all over. 

If the dust on the dirt road gets too hot to be 
comfortable, you’ll usually have to travel only a lit¬ 
tle way farther, before you come to a little stream 
that wanders across the road, singing to itself as 
it goes; and there’ll be a little plank bridge, with 
cool shade underneath and a nice, flat stone for you 
to sit on, while you watch the minnows go darting 
around between the sunshine and the shadow. And, 
sometimes, there are bigger fish there, loafing in 
the deeper places, where the water is sort of black, 
and waiting for a minnow to come along and get 
grabbed. 

Once in a while, you can catch one of those big 
fellows for a fry, but generally they’re too smart 
for a hook. That’s how they get big, I suppose. 
But you don’t need to catch fish to get pleasure out 



80 


Me and Andy 


of fishing. You just sit on your fiat rock, with your 
feet in the water, and rest yourself, while you watch 
the black bugs using the creek for a skating pond, 
for all the world as though there was ice on it. 
And you pick you out one particular bug and try 
to keep your eye on him as he goes in and out 
among all the other bugs; but you can’t stick to one 
bug very long, because their tracks cross each other 
so often that they get you all mixed up. You never 
mind that, though; you just pick out another bug 
and start all over again. I used to try and pretend 
to myself that it was the same bug as the first one, 
but I had to give that up. I’m just naturally too 
honest to cheat myself. 

Maybe, by and by, when you’re beginning to find 
bug-watching a bit tiresome, your cork will start 
bobbing up and down, and right away you’re inter¬ 
ested in things again. Of course, it’s probably only 
a baby sun-fish a-nibbling away at your bait, but 
you never can tell. It might be a regular old he-fish 
and the chance of that keeps the nibbles from get¬ 
ting monotonous. 

If you do happen to land one of those big fellows, 
why then, you can have a regular meal, provided 
of course, that you have some salt. I don’t think 
much of fish without salt, though Andy prefers 
them that way. 



Chapter Eleven 


81 


Another pleasant thing about the dirt road, is 
the trees. Lots of kinds of trees are nice, but I like 
elms and apple trees the best, because they look so 
permanent, as though they’d been there a long time 
and would be there always. Elm trees around a 
place are different from poplars in that way. When 
folks want to fix up a place so as to sell it to some¬ 
body else and move away, they most always stick 
out a lot of poplars for the first big wind to tear 
to pieces. But, when they intend to live in a house 
for always, you can just bet that they’ll put in an 
elm or two, and add some apple trees, so as to have 
fruit. If the elms and the apple trees are big, and 
old and gnarly, that means that the folks who are 
living in the house on the place are, as like as not, 
the children of the ones who built it. Some of that 
I learned for myself, and some of it I remember 
Dad telling me one time when we went for a walk 
in the country. He took me only once, but we’d 
have gone a great deal, if he’d lived. 

I used to lie under an old elm, or an apple tree, 
by the roadside and think a lot about Dad. At first, 
it kind of hurt me to do that but, by and by, I got 
to see the pleasure that could be got out of remem¬ 
bering him, and then it didn’t hurt any more. And 
I’d think of other things, too, and wonder about 
things in general, without bothering to think. You 



82 


Me and Andy 


can do a lot of wondering without thinking any to 
speak of, especially when you’re lying under a 
gnarly old tree, by the side of a twisty old, dusty 
old road. 

You just flop there on your back with your 
knees bent and one leg crossed over the other, and 
a-swinging free and easy, and you put your hands 
under your head, which is very comfortable. Then 
you chew on one end of a piece of green hay that’s 
so long its tassel bends down and tickles your nose, 
as you look up lazy-like at the little patch of blue 
sky you can see through an open place among the 
leaves. Little, teeny bits of pink and white cloud 
drift across the blue once in a while, and no two 
of them are shaped alike. That and the hum of 
the bees is enough to keep you as happy as you’d 
want. 

Once in a while, you shift yourself a little, in 
order to keep on being comfortable, and you reach 
out a hand to scratch your dog back of the ear, so 
as to make sure that he’s enjoying himself as much 
as you are. He’s satisfied just to be with you, but 
a little ear-scratching helps too. 

By and by, you drift off to sleep and, when you 
wake up, you’re as hungry as though you’d never 
had a meal in all your born days. That’s when 
you’re glad to be on the old turnpike, instead of on 



Chapter Eleven 


83 


the cement road, for back-road folks may not have 
their barns as well painted as cement-road folks 
have, but they are usually willing to let you earn 
a meal, and they’ll allow you to sleep in their 
hay-mows, provided you’re sure you haven’t any 
matches in your clothes. Yes siree; the old dirt 
road for me, every time. 




CHAPTER TWELVE 


NE mean thing about trying to travel with a 



satchel in one hand and a fiddle-case in the 


other is that you can’t keep your hands in your 
pockets which makes it pretty hard to whistle. Why 
you have to have your hands in your pockets before 
you can whistle, I don’t know, but I do know that 
whistling never amounts to much without it. That’s 
one reason girls mostly can’t whistle. Once Dad 
took me to a vaudeville show that had a girl in it 
who sure could whistle, and she wore an apron that 
had pockets in it. Her hands were in them, too. 

I whistle a good deal, myself; not that I’m so 
good at it, but because, when I’m feeling good, 
whistling keeps me that way, and when I’m not, 
why then, somehow, whistling drives my blues 
away. In fact, the less I have to whistle about, the 
more I feel the need of whistling; I guess I’m dif¬ 
ferent that way. So you can see that having both 
hands full interfered a lot during the first part of 
my trip. 

Of course, my satchel didn’t weigh much, and so 
Andy could carry it a little way once in a while, 
but the handle was real leather, which is a big 
temptation to any dog. At home, Andy had always 


84 



She sat rocking am 


laugfung at me while I ivas doing 
my icashing 



































Chapter Twelve 


85 


had an old shoe that was his own special property, 
but on the road there wasn’t any old shoe for him 
most of the time. For that reason I didn’t feel 
like blaming him a whole lot, when he chewed the 
handle off my satchel, even though I’ve never had 
any appetite for old leather myself. 

Besides, I really didn’t need a satchel as much 
as I had when I started out, because I’d been throw¬ 
ing away worn-out things as I went along. So a 
satchel without a handle being of no use to me, I 
decided to get rid of it. I put my fishing line in 
my pocket, stuffed my spare blouse inside the one 
I was wearing, and threw the satchel over the rail 
of a bridge. It floated finely for a way, but then 
it got caught in an eddy and was pushed up against 
some willows. 

It had been a good satchel, when it was new, and 
I wanted to give it a decent send-off; so I went down 
along the creek and fished it out. Then I poked a 
little hole in one of the sides, stuck in a switch for 
a mast, and made a sail out of a piece of cardboard 
from a box that happened to be lying there. I tied 
a couple of feet of fish line to one end of the satchel 
and a heavy short stick to the other end of the lit¬ 
tle line. Then I launched her again and she sailed 
away down stream as prettily as any boat you ever 
saw. The wind was blowing the same way that the 



86 


Me and Andy 


river ran, and there were little waves, but the old 
school satchel rode them in fine style till she was 
clear out of sight. 

I was sorry to part with my satchel, but I was 
mighty glad to be without it, at that, for now I had 
one hand free and could switch the fiddle from that 
hand to the other without stopping to set it down. 
It’s funny how good it feels to get rid of something 
that you’ve thought you couldn’t do without. Money 
isn’t that way, though. You like to spend it, but 
you never are glad it’s gone, especially if you are 
hungry yourself, and have a dog on your hands 
that was born hungry and will always be that way. 
Dogs are even worse than boys about that, I guess, 
and the bigger the dog, the bigger the appetite. 

Well, what would you do, if you were broke and 
hungry, but had a fiddle that was worth a hundred 
dollars? You might try your luck at fishing, and 
at finding raw things to eat in the fields. But some¬ 
times the fish don’t bite, and in the spring there’s 
mighty little raw stuff that’s fit to eat. Summer 
and fall are the time for that. Then there are ber¬ 
ries along the roadside. They are very good, though 
they aren’t as filling as fish or fried eggs. 

I guess that if you were in that sort of a fix, 
you’d think considerably about selling your fiddle, 
even if you thought a lot of it and it had belonged 



Chapter Twelve 


87 


to your dad. You might want to keep it, but every 
time you got hungry you’d get to thinking about 
what an awful lot of hot-dogs or ham-and-eggs a 
fellow could get for one hundred dollars, or fifty, 
or even five. It was that way with me. I think a 
great deal when I’m hungry, but when I’m fed as 
full as I can stand without its hurting me, I can 
get along right comfortably for a whole string of 
hours without bothering to think at all. 

So, I decided to sell my fiddle. That meant go¬ 
ing into some town, a thing I’d been avoiding as 
much as possible for a lot of reasons. In the first 
place, all towns have cops, and all cops are curious, 
especially small-town ones. Nobody ever misbe¬ 
haves much there, and the cops just live in hope 
that the next stranger who comes along will be a 
desperate criminal or a run-away boy. Criminals 
suit them all right, but a run-away boy is better. 
He isn’t dangerous, and they get just as much glory 
for picking him up, as if he were a bank-robber. 

There’s another danger for a boy in a strange 
town, and that is that some home-town boy may 
not know any better than to sic his dog on the 
stranger boy’s dog. Then, if the stranger boy’s dog 
is like Andy, the home-town dog isn’t any good for 
dog purposes any more. You can play funeral with 
him, but that’s all. A thing like that is likely to 



88 


Me and Andy 


make the home-town boy so mad that he goes and 
gets his Pa, and his Pa gets the policeman. Then 
the stranger boy is lucky to get out of town fast 
enough to keep the policeman from shooting his dog! 
Andy and I had one experience like that, but it hap¬ 
pened that the policeman had forgotten to bring any 
bullets along for his gun. He went home for them, 
but Andy and I didn’t have time to wait. A man 
who didn’t like that policeman gave us a ride out 
of town on his truck. 

So, you can see that I wasn’t particularly keen 
on going into any strange towns that I could keep 
out of. But it looked as if I wasn’t going to have 
any choice in the matter. That fiddle had to be 
sold, or I was going to get clean out of the habit 
of eating. 

I figured that I’d get more money for the fiddle, 
if I was sort of slicked up and prosperous looking, 
and to be that way I needed a good bath and a 
clean blouse. So I hunted me a pond that wasn’t 
in plain sight of the road, and then went up to the 
next farm-house and asked the lady there if she’d 
lend me a cake of soap. I offered to do some work 
for it, but she said it was worth the soap to meet 
a boy, who was going to take a bath because he 
wanted to. She asked me whether I was sure I 
wasn’t coming down with measles, and when I said 



Chapter Twelve _89 

I’d had them a long while ago, she let me have the 
soap. 

She did more than that for me, too, for she let 
me take a bath in her wood-shed and gave me all 
the hot water I wanted. She kept the water in a 
place she called a “resevoy.” It was a part of the 
kitchen stove, and you scooped the hot water out 
with a dipper. She gave me a towel to use, too. 

When I’d finished my bath, the woman had me 
put on one of her husband’s night shirts while I 
washed my pants and both my blouses in the tub. 
I had to use fresh water for that. 

While I was doing my washing, the woman sat 
in an old broken rocking chair on the back porch, 
rocking back and forth and laughing at me. She 
certainly was a funny woman. 

She was a mighty good woman, though, for she 
ironed my pants and my two blouses for me and 
mended the torn places. The pants were in pretty 
bad shape and had to be what she called “half- 
soled.” Then she cut my hair for me. It needed 
it pretty badly or I wouldn’t have let her do it, be¬ 
cause just as I suspected, she wasn’t any too good 
as a barber. She had to use a bowl to straighten 
the job, but, at that, it was an improvement on the 
way it ha'd been; at least, it stayed out of my eyes. 

After I’d had my hair cut, the woman gave me 



90 


Me and Andy 


and Andy our lunch and told us that the next town 
was a big one, where there were four or five stores 
that sold violins. She said that maybe one of them 
might buy mine, though she supposed a second¬ 
hand fiddle wouldn’t bring much. 

All the time that we were eating, the old woman 
kept on talking and she was mighty smart about 
the way she did it, for every minute or so she’d 
break off sharp and fire a question at me. Every 
question hooked onto the one she’d asked a while 
back, too, but not having anything to lie about, I 
didn’t mind that. I think that woman would have 
been a wonderful school teacher. I asked her if 
she’d been one, and she laughed and said she hadn’t. 
“But I’ve raised a big parcel of boys,” she said, 
“and I’ve got eyes in the back of my head. One of 
my boys is a preacher, and one’s a lawyer and one’s 
a mighty good farmer, but they can’t any of them 
pull the wool over their old mother’s eyes and they 
know better than to try. I raised them right.” I 
bet she did, too. 

Before I left, she made me wash my neck once 
more. Then she put a necktie on me and boxed my 
ears and kissed me. She boxed my ears so easy it 
didn’t hurt, but I hadn’t worn a necktie for a long 
time, and it sort of choked me at first. 



CHAPTER THIRTEEN 


T HE town where I went to sell my fiddle was 
the biggest I’d been anywhere near since I’d 
left Chicago. It had honest-to-goodness street-cars 
and traffic cops; and everything, such as big build¬ 
ings, railroad yards and a river. The buildings 
weren’t as tall as those down-town in Chicago, but 
the river was a whale of a lot bigger. The name 
of the town was Peoria, and I’d read about it in my 
Geography, but had forgotten all except the name. 
I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit that, but 
it’s true. 

It takes a long time to hike it into a big town, 
even after you’ve reached the outside edge of it, 
and I guess that Andy and I must have tramped 
for more than two hours before we got down-town 
where the big stores were. It was about five-thirty 
in the afternoon, when we finally made it, and peo¬ 
ple were beginning to go home from work. So I 
knew that the fiddle wasn’t very likely to get sold 
that day. I hated awfully to spend my last thirty- 
three cents before I’d made some kind of a deal, 
because I had sense enough to know that when 
you’re broke in town you’re much broker than you 
are, when you’re broke out in the country. There 


91 


92 


Me and Andy 


are no haylofts in town, you know, and no wood- 
piles. 

I offered to help several news-boys with selling 
their papers, if they’d give me a dime for doing it, 
but it seemed that they preferred to earn the money 
themselves. They were right friendly, though, and 
allowed me to read from the papers on their stands. 
It was the first time I’d read any for weeks, but 
I could do it as well as ever. One of the fellows 
told me his name was Sam, and he offered to run 
away with me, and go to Missouri, if I’d give him 
a half interest in Andy; but I explained to him that 
Andy wasn’t the half-interest kind of dog, and that, 
even if I gave him a share in him, Andy would 
never stick by any such bargain. Sam said that 
he’d run away a lot of times which showed poor 
sense, I think, because he said that his home was 
all right. 

Sam said, too, that once he’d been gone for nearly 
three weeks. He was really proud of that, but you 
ought to have seen his eyes pop out, when I told 
him that I’d been on the road for almost six weeks, 
without having run away at all. I told him I 
wouldn’t think of being a runaway, and he winked 
and said, “Neither would your old man,” which is 
a thing we’d quit saying in Chicago over a month 
before I left there. Sam was awfully slangy, but 



Chapter Thirteen 


93 


lots of his slang was so far out of date that I’d 
never even heard of it before. I suppose it went 
out in Chicago before I was born. 

All the same, though, Sam knew one or two things 
that were of use to me, and one of them was that 
sometimes you could get your meals and a bit of 
change for washing dishes in a restaurant. He said 
that he’d lived that way for a week once, when his 
money was gone, before he was ready to come home. 
So I tackled it, and I had good luck, too, for the 
fifth place I tried needed a dish-washer for that 
night. You see, the Greek that had that job had a 
boil on the end of his nose, which prevented him 
from being able to wash dishes, because your nose 
always itches when you wash dishes, and it’s not 
safe to scratch a boil. There was another fellow 
working there, who might have done the work for 
that night, but he’d managed to get one of his fin¬ 
gers smashed in a meat chopper. I wouldn’t want 
to work in a restaurant as a steady job. It’s too 
dangerous. 

The Greek who owned the restaurant offered me 
fifty cents and two meals to wash dishes all night, 
but I stuck out for a dollar and got it. It took all 
my nerve to insist on that dollar, because I needed 
the work, but, long before morning, I was mighty 
glad I’d done it. I’d never have supposed that there 



94 


Me and Andy 


could be so many dirty dishes in the world as they 
piled on me that night. And sleepy! Say, when I 
got through at seven o’clock the next morning I was 
asleep on my feet. 

Breakfast helped me a lot, though, and I sure 
had a fine appetite. I ate a big steak with some 
potatoes, and three fried eggs. I ate six slices of 
bread and butter, too, and drank three glasses of 
milk. Then I ate part of a piece of pie. It was 
good pie, but I didn’t want all of it. 

Andy had a plateful of bones and a lot of stale 
bread with gravy over it. He made a good meal, 
but there was too much for him, and he had to quit 
when over half what I’d given him was still on the 
plate. It was the first time that that had ever hap¬ 
pened to Andy, and I had to laugh to see him give 
up and quit. He looked puzzled, as though he were 
afraid he was getting old. So I wrapped the rest 
of his meal up in a piece of newspaper for next 
time. Then we went out of the restaurant’s back 
door and down the hill to where there was a rail¬ 
road yard that ran alongside the river. There was 
a big pile of railroad ties there, and I climbed up 
on them and slept in the sunshine for about four 
hours. 

Probably I’d have slept longer than that, if Andy 
hadn’t waked me up with his growling. He was 



Chapter Thirteen 


95 


making a terrible noise in his throat, and I could 
hear a man crying. I’d never heard a man cry like 
that before, and I looked over the edge of the pile 
of ties to see what it was all about. 

There was a tramp lying there, and Andy was 
standing squarely over him, ready to crush the 
tramp’s throat, if he should even try to get up. 
Gee! but that fellow was a scared one. I told Andy 
to let him get up, and the tramp did so, but he was 
still scared. I asked him what had happened, and 
he said that he hadn’t been doing a thing. He said 
he was just walking by, when Andy jumped on him 
and knocked him down. That puzzled me for a 
moment, because it didn’t sound like Andy to do 
that. Then I noticed that my fiddle was lying on 
the ground, instead of being on top the pile of ties, 
where I’d laid it, and in a flash I understood what 
was going on. That tramp had seen that I was 
asleep, and had tried to steal my fiddle. He must 
not have known that Andy was my dog, because, 
as a rule, tramps are terribly afraid of dogs. Any¬ 
how, this one would be that way from now on, 
which would be a good thing because then he would 
be honest whenever there was a dog around. 

Of course, when I had collared Andy, the tramp 
got very brave and tried to show off. He said he 
was going to call a policeman and have me arrested 




96 


Me and AMy 


and Andy shot. That didn’t worry me any, be¬ 
cause I knew that calling a policeman would be just 
about the last thing in the world that a tramp, who 
had been trying to steal, would think of doing. 
Tramps don’t tell their troubles to police officers. 
They know better than that. 

But it just happened that a policeman did show 
up there while the tramp was talking about call¬ 
ing one, and he went through the tramp’s clothes 
to see if he had a pistol. The tramp didn’t have 
any; so the policeman didn’t arrest him. He just 
told him to get out of that town and stay out. Then 
the policeman turned to me and told me to run along 
and take my music lesson, if I hadn’t yet had it, 
and, if I had had it, to get for home. 

“If I catch you hanging around this railroad yard 
again, I’ll run you in,” he told me, and I answered, 
“Yes Sir,” as politely as I knew how, and got out 
of there as fast as I could go without running. So 
far, it was my lucky day. If it hadn’t been a Satur¬ 
day, he’d have picked me up for a truant, just as 
sure as a gun’s a pistol. 

Sleeping in the sun certainly does make you hun¬ 
gry. I’d had the biggest meal of my whole life only 
a bit over four hours before, and now I was as 
hungry as if food and I had been strangers all our 
lives. So I went back to the Greek restaurant again 



Chapter Thirteen 


97 


and ate a good lunch that I paid money for. Andy 
waited outside for me, and, when I came out, I 
offered him the bones I’d saved from his breakfast, 
but he wasn’t hungry yet. So I put the package 
back in my pocket; it made me feel more comfort¬ 
able to know where his supper was coming from. 
A fellow shouldn’t keep a dog unless he’s willing to 
do his worrying for him, you know. 

Being sure that I’d have plenty of money as soon 
as I’d sold my fiddle, I thought I could afford a 
nickel for a chocolate bar and a penny to weigh 
myself. You just have to waste a few cents now 
and then, you '’ee, or you never get the full enjoy¬ 
ment there is in earning and having money. That 
penny was well spent, anyhow, for I found out that 
I’d gained six pounds since I’d left Chicago, which 
proved that hiking hadn’t hurt me any. I’d been 
wet and cold many times in those six weeks, but I’d 
eaten pretty regularly after the first day or so, and 
I’d got in some right good fishing. All in all, I 
hadn’t had a bad time of it, except of course, for 
lonesomeness and one dog-bite and a toe that was 
stubbed pretty badly. So I felt pretty good, as I 
went along, eating my chocolate bar and looking 
for the right place to sell my fiddle. 

I passed two or three music stores that were 
away too swagger for me to go into with bare feet 



98 


Me and Andy 


and patched pants, but it began to look as if there 
wasn’t any store there of the kind I was hunting. 
You can never tell, though, for just as I was going 
to give up for a while, and look for a place to sit 
down and rest, I found exactly the store I wanted. 
It was on a little side street that had barely missed 
being an alley, and it was a kind of musty, dusty- 
looking old place; but there was no question about 
its being a fiddle store, for the window was full of 
them. 




CHAPTER FOURTEEN 



HE store had looked queer enough from the 


X street, but when I got inside the door I saw 
that the place was even stranger than I had 
thought. Along one side of the room was an old 
show-case that hadn’t had any varnish on it for 
more years than I was old. It was a tall show¬ 
case with shelves in it, and both shelves were loaded 
with fiddles; big fiddles, middle-sized fiddles, and 
little fiddles. One of them was so small that I guess 
it must have been meant for a dwarf. Then there 
were wires strung across the room up near the ceil¬ 
ing, and on these wires fiddles were hung by the 
neck, for all the world like butcher-shop turkeys 
the week before Thanksgiving. There was no oil¬ 
cloth on the floor, but it surely needed one, for it 
was so old that it was all worn splintery. At the 
back of the room was a door-way. There was no 
door there, though. The door-way was just closed 
by a curtain that had been green once, but wasn’t 
any more. 

When I opened the door from the street, a little 
bell tinkled in the room that was back of the cur¬ 
tain, and a voice called out, “All right.” Then, in 
a minute, the fiddle-shop man came through the 


99 


100 


Me and Andy 


door-way. He looked, somehow, as though he had 
been a very large man, when he was young, but 
had got all dried up and stooped over as he grew 
old, for now he was thin and wrinkled and so 



1 tried to jerk away from the old fellow 


humped that he was only two or three inches taller 
than I was. 

His eyes had faded until they scarcely were blue 
at all any more, but he could see all right in spite 
of all the dust that was on his queer old spectacles, 
because he seemed to look right through me, as I 



































Chapter Fourteen 


101 


went up to him and said, “Excuse me, Sir, but 

would you like to buy-?” which was as far as I 

got when he grabbed me in both his arms and most 
hugged the life out of me. As he did so, the old 
fellow yelled out, “Jim, you little devil, you quit 
playing tricks like that on your poor old dad. 
Poppy’s old, and he doesn’t like it. You oughtn’t 
to use Poppy that way.” 

I tried to jerk away from the old fellow, but, 
withered as he was, he was really very strong, and 
held onto me so tightly that I was as helpless as a 
baby. It was a lucky thing for him that I’d left 
Andy outside. If I hadn’t, I’m afraid he’d have 
bitten that old man terribly. Andy’d never allow 
anyone to hurt or frighten me, when he was around, 
I know. As it was, Andy heard me yell out for 
the old man to let me go and, thinking I was in trou¬ 
ble threw himself against the glass of the street- 
door so hard that it was a wonder he didn’t come 
right through it. 

Well, Sir, the old man kept on a-talking and 
a-hugging me, and pretty soon I saw that he didn’t 
mean me any harm, but really had a notion that I 
was his boy, and was tickled to death to see me. 
So I quit trying to get away from him, and prom¬ 
ised I’d not run out of the door, if he let go of me. 
Then he said, “All right, Jim; kiss Poppy,” and I 



102 ___ Me and Andy. 

did. He was awfully whiskery, but I stood it bet¬ 
ter than I thought I could. 

But, just as soon as I began to try to argue him 
out of the notion that I belonged to him, the old fel¬ 
low began to get worked up again, so that I knew 
I was never going to get out of my promise to him 
in that way, and had to try something else. So I 
said to him, “Poppy, may I let my dog into the 
store?” 

“Let Pedro in? Why not?” said he. “When did 
I ever make Pedro stay outside? You and he must 
both be nearly starved to death, anyhow. The idea 
of you two gallivanting around for a week and a 
half at a time.” Then I let Andy in, and the poor 
old man made an awful fuss over him, calling him 
Pedro, though, instead of Andy. 

Now, as a general rule, Andy treats strangers 
as though they weren’t on earth at all. He’s never 
cross, unless they bother him or me, but he’s no 
puppy to go playing around with every Tom, Dick, 
or Harry that comes along. So, I was more than 
a bit surprised to see him almost wriggle himself 
out of his skin, when the old man began to pet him. 
I have a lot of confidence in Andy’s judgment of 
folks; so I said to myself, “This old man probably 
is crazy, for he acts that way, but, crazy or not, 
he must be a fine fellow or Andy wouldn’t make up 



Chapter Fourteen 


103 


with him like that. Having decided on that much, 
I decided also that I might as well stick around a 
while, seeing as how I wasn’t in any particular 
hurry and was welcome. 

The old man gave us both a fine feed, mostly 
canned stuff, but all right at that. Then after we’d 
sat and talked for an hour or so, with him doing 
most of the talking and me understanding what 
I could, he told me it was time for me to get to bed. 
My bed was a shake-down on the floor, and Andy’s 
was a bit of old rag carpet, but we were a lot bet¬ 
ter off than we’d have been in any hay-mow. Be¬ 
sides, Poppy Vaughn said he’d hunt me up a new 
bed in the morning. “For the life of me, I can’t 
remember where I set your old one,” said he. 

It looked as though Andy and I were in for a 
long stay with a lunatic, but as I whispered to 
Andy, “There are worse folks than a right nice 
lunatic. Being crazy would improve some people 
a lot.” 



CHAPTER FIFTEEN 

E VERY time I get to thinking that I’m smart 
enough to make a plan and stick to it, some¬ 
thing turns up to knock my figuring for a block- 
long row of ash-cans. For instance, I went into 
Poppy Vaughn’s shop intending to stay, at most, 
five or ten minutes, just long enough to sell my fid¬ 
dle and be on my way, but by the time I got away 
from that shop for keeps I was months older than 
I was when I first went in the door. 

Not that I’d have had any real trouble in get¬ 
ting away, if I’d really wanted to skip out, for 
I wouldn’t have had; but that I didn’t want to make 
myself a liar. You see, every time I went out of 
the door, the old fellow made me promise him to 
be back in an hour or two, or three, as the case 
might be. Then he’d cock his head over on one 
side, and say, “All right, Jim. Have a good time. 
Poppy knows you wouldn’t lie to him on purpose.” 
Now, I ask you, what can a fellow do with an old 
fool like that, except to keep the word he’s passed? 

Even lying about coming back might not have 
bothered me any at first, but I didn’t want to start 
out without getting the money I knew my fiddle 
was worth, or else the fiddle itself, and he seemed 


104 


Chapter Fifteen 


105 


to think the fiddle was his, and kept it over back 
of his bench, except when he made me practice on 
it, which was two hours every day. Of course, I 
could have helped myself to as much money as 
I thought the fiddle was worth, and have just 
walked off with it, because Poppy didn’t hide his 
money from me at all like he did from other folks, 
but that would have been away too close to stealing 
to suit me. Besides, if I took too much, I’d have 
been an honest-to-goodness thief, and if I didn’t 
take enough I’d have been half thief and half fool. 
I don't know anything worse than that. The whole 
business was too mixed up for my head, so I sort 
of let things slide, and just stuck around to see what 
would happen. That’s always a very comfortable 
way, even though it doesn’t often get you anywhere. 
I do that way a lot. 

Poppy was pretty rich. He had over a hundred 
fiddles, worth whatever people might pay for them, 
besides nearly nine hundred dollars that he kept in 
the old coffee-can on his work-bench. The coffee- 
can had two tops and no bottom. I mean, that is, 
that both ends were tops and that the bottom was 
inside, about the middle of the can. The top top 
was usually off the can, and you saw only a lot of 
tuning pegs for fiddles, but when you put the top 
top on and turned the coffee-can upside down, you 



106 


Me and Andy 


could lift off the bottom too and see the money. 
I thought that was a pretty slick scheme for a crazy 
man to figure out all by himself, and I think so yet. 

The nine hundred dollars was all in big bills. 
One of them was a five hundred dollar one, and I 
used to wonder what it would be like to walk into 
a restaurant and lay that bill down to pay for a 
mess of ham and eggs. I’d be willing to bet they’d 
think you were a millionaire, if you did that. I 
asked Poppy, and he gave me a sharp look and 
said, “Jim, you keep away from that can. If you 
want any money take it out of the drawer. What’s 
in the drawer is yours and mine. What’s in the 
coffee-can is all mine.” That would have been pie 
for me, if I’d really been Jim Vaughn, for I could 
have taken a bit every day until my fiddle was paid 
for. But I wasn’t going to take any such advan¬ 
tage of the old man’s craziness. I knew mighty 
well that Dad would have whaled me for anything 
like that, if he’d been alive, and I wasn’t doing 
things I knew Dad would have hated, when I knew 
what they were. He’d told me that, when you want 
to do a thing and don’t know whether or not it’s 
wrong, you can pretty safely bet it is. So I let 
Poppy Vaughn’s money alone, cash-drawer, coffee- 
can and all. 

Eating Poppy’s food and sleeping in back of his 




Chapter Fifteen 


107 


shop didn’t worry me any, though, because I fig¬ 
ured I just about earned my keep and Andy’s by 
the work I did. I swept out the shop every day, 
and I did most of the cooking and about all the 
dish-washing. The place was pretty dirty when I 
came, and I guess Poppy sort of liked it that way, 
for he grumbled a lot at first, whenever I slicked 
things up a bit. I’m a perfect fool about cleanli¬ 
ness, though, and want my bed made up fresh 
every Saturday, and my dishes held under the 
faucet every day. I may be finicky, but I just 
can’t help it. It’s my nature, I guess. 

There was another way that I helped to earn my 
keep and that was by practicing two hours a day 
on the violin, learning to play by note, which was 
an awful nuisance, and a waste of time, too, be¬ 
cause playing by ear is a whole lot easier. But 
Poppy said ear-playing was an abomination, and 
he threatened to lick me every time he caught me 
at it. He said that there was only one decent way 
to fiddle, and that was to play by note until you 
knew the piece so well that you didn’t need notes 
any more, which is all foolishness, as anybody can 
see. For, if you are going to quit using the notes 
by and by, why fool with them to start? But you 
can’t argue with a lunatic, even when he’s as nice 
as Poppy Vaughn. So I let him have his way, 



108___ Me and Andy 

which is a good plan with lunatics and most other 
folks. 

Poppy couldn’t fiddle worth a hang, himself, 
which was a funny thing, when you remember that 
he could make or fix a violin better than anybody 
else anywhere, except for some fellows that had 
been dead a hundred years. Everybody said that, 
and all the musicians in that part of the state used 
to bring their fiddles to the old man when they 
needed fixing. Once a really great fiddler came to 
town to play a concert, and he visited Poppy, and 
played for him on the special fiddle the old man 
kept locked up in a drawer. Poppy called it a 
Guarnerius and said that there weren’t more than 
a dozen fellows in the world that were fit to play 
on it. 

Another funny thing about Poppy Vaughn was 
that, though he couldn’t play music, he could make 
it up, and write it down on paper for other folks 
to play. People had found out about that, and once 
in a while somebody would come in and whistle a 
tune for him to write down, or they would have 
one written down, but it would be wrong some 
way, and the old man would have to fix it for them. 
Sometimes they’d pay him for his work along that 
line, but usually they’d just say that they’d come 
back and settle up. They never did, though. I 



Chapter Fifteen 


109 


guess they’d forget all about it, and so would he. 

Poppy loved to talk politics, but he was all mixed 
up about it. He’d be talking about the World Court, 
or something, and, all of a sudden, he’d stop short 
and lay one finger along his nose. Then he’d wink 
at me and say that King George, or Mussolini, or 
the president had been in to see him and had told 
him all about it. Then, when I’d tell him that there 
wasn’t anything in the papers about their being in 
town, he’d look very wise and say, “Naturally, my 
boy. Incog, Sonny, incog.” He certainly was in¬ 
cog, all right, the incoggest man I ever met; but he 
was mighty interesting company at that. 

As I’ve already told you, one of the things Poppy 
was incog about was that idea of his that I was 
his boy, Jim, and I wondered if there’d ever really 
been such a person until one day I got to looking 
over some old books he had and found the name 
James Vaughn in some of them, together with the 
dates when Poppy had given them to him. They 
were very old books. The very newest one had 
written on the blank page in front, “To Jim from 
Poppy and Mom on his fourteenth birthday, July 
10th, 1888.” So I figured that, if Jim was living, 
he was an old man by now. I found out after¬ 
wards, though, that Jim and his mother had been 
drowned on an excursion, and that Poppy had been 



110 


Me and Andy 


sort of cracked ever since. He’d tried to grab a 
lot of different boys, thinking that each one was 
Jim, but I was the first one that hadn’t had any¬ 
body to interfere. The cop on the corner next to 
Poppy’s shop told me about that. He asked me if 
I had any folks, and when I told him I didn’t know, 
he told me I might be a lot worse off some place 
else and would be wise to say nothing and to stay 
where I was. 

You’d think that I’d have been scared stiff at 
living with a crazy man that way, but I wasn’t the 
least bit, after I’d really got to know him. When 
you like folks you don’t mind their being crazy at 
all, and I was happier than I’d been at any time 
since Dad died. Poppy needed me, and being 
needed is about the most useful thing there is to 
keep a fellow contented. 




CHAPTER SIXTEEN 
OMPARED to Chicago, Peoria isn’t such a 



v_. very big town, but there are quite a lot of 
people there at that, and an average number of 
them are boys, which makes it an all-right kind 
of place for a boy like me to live. It didn’t take 
me very long to begin to get acquainted, and in 
that I found Andy a great help, because everybody 
wants to know a fellow who has the best dog in 
town. 

The name of the boy, who lived in the flat above 
Poppy’s shop was George Zeller. He was a very 
nice boy. He was in first year at high-school, but 
he was nearly a year younger than I was. I’d only 
been through seventh grade myself on account of 
not having gone to school as regular as I ought. 

George didn’t have any dog, because his mother 
said they tracked in dirt, but he eottened to Andy 
right away, and when he came home from school 
the Monday after I got to town, he showed me an 
alley where we could catch rats. We had a fine 
time that afternoon and Andy caught seventeen 
rats, which George said was probably a world rec¬ 
ord. George was a pretty smart boy, all right. 
He knew how to get in the papers. What he did, 


iu 


112 


Me and Andy 


Was to tie all the rats on a string by their tails. 
Then he took hold of one end of the string and I 
took hold of the other and we went down and stood 
in front of the newspaper office until a man came 
out and took our picture. Andy was in the pic¬ 



ture, too, which was only fair, as he was the one 
who had caught the rats. They printed the picture 
the next day. 

I guess it’s easier to get your picture in the 
paper in a small town than in a really big city; 
for in Chicago Andy’d been catching rats for over 





































Chapter Sixteen 


113 


two years and no paper had ever thought of print¬ 
ing anything about it. I told George that, but he 
said that was because Andy needed a manager, and 
had never really had one before. Pete Johnson 
said so, too, and so did Frank Beckert and both of 
the Pahlman boys. 

Of course, I told the fellows my real name, but 
they all understood that they weren’t to call me 
anything except Jim when Poppy Vaughn was 
around. They stuck to it, too, and called me that, 
even when I was with them alone; so that pretty 
soon I was so used to being Jim instead of Jack 
that I might not have turned around to see who 
it was, if someone had called me by my right name. 
When anybody new asked me my name, I always 
said, “My friends call me Jim, and you can do that 
if you want to,” which wasn’t a lie, but served the 
purpose just as well as a lie would have done, and 
left me feeling ever so much more honest. I guess 
people usually believe about what you want them 
to believe, without your needing to tell lies, any¬ 
how. 

When Sunday came around, I went to Sunday 
School with George Zeller, and he gave my name 
to the teacher as Jim Vaughn, which was what she 
wrote down in her little book. She made quite a 
fuss over George for bringing me. She was a very 




114 


Me and Andy 


nice teacher but kind of dumb. I don’t believe 
she would have lasted long in a regular day school. 
She couldn’t keep discipline well enough. 

One of the other Sunday Schools was having a 
new membership contest between its classes, and a 
contest in how much the scholars knew. You got 
ten points for knowing the golden text and another 
ten points for each of the commandments and 
beatitudes you could recite; but new scholars were 
good for fifty points apiece. George Zeller’s Sun¬ 
day School only allowed twenty-five points for new 
scholars. I’d have preferred to go to the school 
where they’d value me the highest, but George 
Zeller and one of the Pahlman boys had a wrestling 
match about it, and George won. George was a 
very good wrestler. He could throw me sometimes, 
but not always. 

The wrestling match between George and the 
Pahlman boy might have ended up in a fight, if I 
hadn’t found out that George’s Sunday School came 
an hour and a quarter earlier than the other one, 
and offered to go to that one too, if the Pahlman 
boys would let me play their mouth organ when 
I wanted to. At that, I lost on the deal, because 
the collection cost me a nickel, and I could have 
rented the mouth organ all day for three cents. 
But both Sunday Schools had the same lesson, and 



Chapter Sixteen 


115 


my having been all over it once that morning, made 
me the best pupil in my class at the second school. 
So I marched up in front with the smartest one 
from each of the other classes, and the superintend¬ 
ent gave each of us a picture card with a wreath of 
flowers and a verse printed on it. It was all very 
nice, but I wouldn’t care for two Sunday Schools 
the same day as a regular thing. It’s too much of 
a strain on a fellow. The text on my card was, 
“Thou shalt not lie,” which made me glad that 
I hadn’t claimed my name really was Jim Vaughn. 




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 

I T’S QUEER, when you stop to think of it, how 
quickly you can settle down in a new place, and 
get to feeling as though you had lived there all your 
life. That’s how it was with me at Poppy’s. It 
wasn’t that I’d forgotten Dad, or about having 
lived in Chicago, or about my being on my way to 
Missouri. It was just that it seemed easier to sort 
of drift along, sweeping out the shop, helping with 
the kitchen-work, and playing around with George 
Zeller and the other boys, than it would be to make 
any effort to be on my way. It almost seemed to 
me that Jack Bradford had been some other boy, 
whom I had known a long time back, and that I 
really was Jim Vaughn. I even took to calling 
my dog Pedro, instead of Andy, because Poppy 
Vaughn did. 

A little thing like that doesn’t bother Andy, 
though. He doesn’t care what I call him; only 
wanting me to call him often. Andy understands 
contentment right well. All he wants is regular 
meals, a dry bed and me to talk to him. 

About my life before coming to Poppy Vaughn’s, 
I told the fellows in our gang little or nothing, that 
I’d lost my parents and had come to live with 


116 



Andy teas standing squarely over him 


r ye\ - 



















Chapter Seventeen 


117 


Poppy, and let them take anything they wanted 
for granted. My being there was a good thing for 
the old man, though, because the boys had used to 
bother him a lot by opening the door of his shop 
and yelling at him, because they knew he was kind 
of cracked. They quit that because I lived with 
Poppy and they liked me, but they would have had 
to quit it anyhow. I would never have stood for 
their bothering the old fellow. Crazy or not, he 
was good to me and to my dog, and anybody who 
treats me and Andy right is a pal of ours. 

.Vacation for the Peoria schools began the week 
after I landed there, which was a great relief for 
me, as with the schools going on I’d never have kept 
out of them. Not that I objected to school, for I 
intended to go again, but I wasn’t planning to stay 
forever with Poppy; I was going to be on my way 
to my grandfather’s when I got around to it. Be¬ 
sides, if I went to school, there was an even chance 
of my affairs being nosed into, and then I might be 
sent back to Chicago to be taken into court. The 
best that I could hope from that was that I’d be 
sent to some orphanage to be raised. I wanted to 
raise myself, and if an orphanage took over the 
job, they probably wouldn’t do it my way. Besides, 
I’d have to give up Andy. Orphanages are all right, 



118 


Me and Andy ' 


I guess, but I’d rather have Andy and sleep in a 
hay-stack than own every orphanage there is. 

Well, anyhow it was vacation, and that’s always a 
nice time. It’s nicest, though, when there’s a river 
handy, and you have the use of a canoe. The Pahl- 
man boys had one—a canoe, I mean—and they 
used to take George Zeller, and me and Andy along 
with them. Most dogs would be in the way in a 
canoe, and as likely as not to upset you, but Andy 
wasn’t that way at all. He’d sit in the bow, look¬ 
ing out over the water, and never moving at all 
except to turn his head; but quiet as he was, you 
could tell that he was enjoying himself as much as 
the rest of us. 

So Andy always got to go along, when we paddled 
down to Pekin Lake after perch and sun-fish, or 
bull-heads. Once we caught over a hundred fish 
and, after we’d had a good swim at the sand-bar, 
and had let Andy rescue us, when we pretended to 
be drowning, we had a fry and cooked our whole 
catch. They tasted fine, but, afterwards, we were so 
filled up with fish and with rye-bread and bananas 
and cheese that we had to stretch out in the sun 
for most three hours, before we were able to pad¬ 
dle back up stream to town. 

It was away after dark when I got home to 
Poppy Vaughn’s, and the old man was so worried 



Chapter Seventeen _119 

about me that he was almost wild. He was so re¬ 
lieved to get me back that he licked me, and I had 
to tie Andy in the back yard while I was getting 
my medicine, for fear that he might chew Poppy. 
I’d figured that the old man was entitled to re¬ 
lieve his feelings, and that the licking wouldn’t 
amount to much, which would have worked out all 
right, if I hadn’t forgotten about being freshly 
re-sunburned. Licking is very bad for sunburn. 





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 
‘ A.FING is a very nice way to put in a part of 



your time during the summer, provided that 
you have something pleasant to think about while 
you’re doing it. When you haven’t, loafing is an 
awful bore. Usually, though, I can always think 
of something I’d like to do, or be, or have, or some¬ 
where I’d like to go. 

One of the nicest subjects that I’ve ever found 
for that kind of thinking is, what I’d do with a 
million dollars, if I had it. I put in a lot of time 
at thinking of that, until, one day, I happened to 
see down in one corner of a newspaper that the 
interest on a million dollars was almost two hun¬ 
dred dollars a day. Right away, then, I knew that 
I didn’t want any million dollars because, if I had 
it, I’d have to hire someone to help me spend my 
income, and I prefer to spend my money myself. 

Of course, a fellow could hire a lot of plasterers 
to work for him at ten or twelve dollars a day, and 
could have a lot of fun bossing them, but he’d be 
paid for having the job done, and would be just 
where he started out, besides being all tired out 
and unable to enjoy himself when the day was over. 
Bossing is very wearing work, you know. 


120 


Chapter Eighteen 


121 


So, as a million dollars was much too much, I cut 
myself down to a hundred thousand and got along 
some better, though even that was a strain. But 
when I had reduced my plans to a couple of thou¬ 
sands, I got along fine. A fellow like me wouldn’t 
have any trouble at all in getting rid of a couple 
of thousands. I know, because I walked up and 
down Adams and Jefferson streets, and had every¬ 
thing figured out in less than an hour; it wasn’t 
even hard work. 

First, I picked out a long pants suit that would 
have looked fine on me. I surely needed it, too, 
for my clothes were so small for me by that time 
that the only reason I could wear them was that 
they were broken in enough places to make them 
fairly comfortable. 

Having attended to the clothes question, I next 
picked out an automobile that just suited me. It 
had a green body and red wheels, and there was a 
place in back, where I could put my new clothes 
and a tent to sleep in. That automobile cost twelve 
hundred dollars, which would have made quite a 
hole in my two thousand, if I had had it. 

I figured that with an automobile like that and 
a few hundred dollars cash in my pockets, I could 
roll up before the door of my Missouri grandfather 
in style, and that he would be mighty proud to have 



122 


Me mid Andy 


me for a relative; especially with Andy sitting on 
the seat beside me, and wearing one of those fancy 
harness affairs that all rich folks’ dogs have. 

Thinking about spending all that money gave me 
a very pleasant afternoon, and by the time I had 
to go back to Poppy’s and peel the potatoes for sup¬ 
per, it seemed to me that I really had had the 
money. It was such a jolt to me to come back to 
being as poor as ever, after being rich all after¬ 
noon, that I decided to keep my imagination down 
to what I’d do with a dollar, if I ever had one 
again. That was a snap. If I had a dollar, I’d 
go to the circus that was advertised as coming to 
town in a couple of weeks. 

Now, as a matter of fact, I had had over a dol¬ 
lar, when I landed at Poppy’s, but I’d been down 
the river a few times with George Zeller and the 
Pahlman boys, and my share of the food for the 
trips had cost money. That didn’t take all of it, 
of course, but one day it had been so hot that I 
decided that I just naturally had to have a choco¬ 
late ice-cream soda. Then just as I’d started to 
get my nose into that soda, who should show up but 
the Pahlman boys. 

They’re wonders that way, those Pahlmans. You 
might be broke for two weeks and never lay eyes on 
one of them; but just as sure as a gun’s a pistol, if 




Chapter Eighteen 


123 


you found yourself with a dime and set out to 
treat yourself to a few gum drops, you’d look up 
to see at least one Pahlman standing there and 
looking hungry. You had to ask them to share your 
treat with you, too, because they were the only fel¬ 



lows in our gang that had a canoe. Fellows who 
own canoes have to be treated right by anybody 
who’s half-way polite and who enjoys going canoe¬ 
riding. 

Anyhow, my money was gone, and it was up to 
me to earn some more, if I was intending to have 






































124 


Me and Andy 


a seat at that circus. One thing I was certain of, 
and that was that I didn’t have any intention of 
taking advantage of Poppy’s craziness by accept¬ 
ing his invitation to help myself from the cash- 
drawer. I’d made up my mind that I wasn’t going 
to do that, if I never saw a circus in all my born 
days. 

But, every time that I looked at those circus bill¬ 
boards, I felt more and more the need of going to 
see that show. I was fourteen years old and had 
never been to a circus in all my life. When I’d 
had the money, there had been no circus, and, when 
there’d been a circus, I’d never had the money. 
Things are that way a lot of times with me. I’m 
afraid I’m just different that way. 

So, there was nothing for me to do, if I wanted 
to see that show, except to get me a part-time job 
somewhere. It would have to be a part-time one, 
because at Poppy’s I had to do dishes and help 
with the cooking, as well as practice at violin-play¬ 
ing, which was even worse than the dish-washing. 
Dish-washing isn’t so bad, when no one looks them 
over after you’re through. 

Did you ever sit down on an old box in the alley 
and try to figure out a plan to get some money 
right away? It sounds easy until you try it. First, 
you decide that you’ll make something and sell it, 



Chapter Eighteen 


125 


but you soon see that you cannot do that without 
tools and material. Tools and material cost money, 
and, if you had money you would not need to make 
anything to get some. So, you give that idea up, 
and look around for a better one. 

Next, you decide that you’ll sell something that 
you already have on hand, and you go into the 
house and paw over the junk in your dresser to 
see what you can get along without. There’s a lot 
of it, but the trouble with it is that anybody else 
could do without it just about as well as you could, 
because it was no good in the first place, and is all 
worn out, besides. At least, it was that way with 
me, when I was at Poppy’s. I had a perfectly good 
shot-gun without any barrel or trigger, a watch 
with half the works missing, and a violin that I 
couldn’t take out of Poppy’s sight. 

Of course, I had Andy, and almost anybody that 
had money would jump at the chance to buy a dog 
like him. But, though I’m pretty mean sometimes, 
I never have got to the stage where I’d think seri¬ 
ously of selling Andy for circus money, or any other 
kind of money, either. A fellow that would sell 
his dog for pleasure is too mean even to think about. 
I wouldn’t trust him for a used two-cent stamp. 

So, take it altogether, things were looking far 
from circusy for me that week. 



CHAPTER NINETEEN 

O NE of the most hindering things there is to a 
fellow who is sort of thinking about maybe 
looking for a job is not knowing exactly what kind 
of a job he’s thinking of looking for. I found that 
out, when I picked up a morning newspaper and 
began reading the help-wanted ads. There were 
several places open that I’d rather have liked to 
have, but I sort of figured that they weren’t look¬ 
ing for boys to fill them. For instance; one ad 
called for a steam-shovel operator. 

Now, there’s a real job for you, for a steam- 
shovel is about the most human piece of hardware 
that there is. Maybe, though, I ought to say ani- 
mal-like, instead of human, for it slides its long 
neck out like a mossy, old mud-turtle, and then 
lowers its head as a horse does, and, grazes along 
the ground, biting off sand, gravel, dirt and big 
pieces of smashed-up concrete, as if they were good 
to eat and it was hungry. I know I’m not the only 
fellow that’s been hit with that notion, because, 
over at the library there’s a book with a lot of 
faked-up pictures that pretend to be photographs 
of animals living here about 400,000 years ago. Of 
course anyone knows that there were no photog- 


126 


Chapter Nineteen 


127 


raphers in town that far back, and that the writer 
got the idea of such animals from watching a 
steam-shovel. 

The man that runs the steam-shovel is a mighty 
smooth article, too, as a rule. He just stands up 
there on his little platform, and pulls the right 
lever without bothering to look and see which one 
it is. He makes that steam-shovel mind him as 
smoothly as though it were a trick poodle, and he 
a ring-master. You can bet your last dollar that 
I’d like to be a crack steam-shovel engineer, and 
stand up there doing my stuff, with half the loaf¬ 
ers in town hanging over a board railing to gawk 
at me. 

I spent so much time that morning making mind- 
pictures of myself as a steam-shovel man that I 
almost missed the advertisement that really fitted 
me. It was away down in one corner of the paper 
and was only three lines. You could tell from read¬ 
ing it that the fellow, who’d put it in, had counted 
his words to make the lines come out even. He’d 
have to be that sort, or he wouldn’t advertise for 
a large, strong boy, because that kind of ad always 
means that someone is wanted, who has a back 
strong enough to do a man’s work, and a mind 
weak enough to accept a boy’s wages. When the 
ad calls for an old man, you can bet that they’re 



128 


Me and Andy 


not figuring on paying out much money either. 
That morning, though, I didn’t figure much about 
what might be behind the ad. I just answered it, 
and let it go at that. 

The address given in the paper showed that the 
place was way up on the hill, all of three miles 
from Poppy Vaughn’s shop, and I’d have had to 
take a street-car to get there, if I hadn’t had Andy 
for company. A good dog can sure save a fellow 
a lot of carfare that way, though he probably slows 
him down a bit sometimes. It’s worth it, though. 

When I got to the house that was mentioned in 
the advertisement, I almost backed down about 
hunting a job there, because the place was so big 
I reckoned I wouldn’t be swell enough for it, but 
I noticed the grass had needed cutting for a long 
time, which took the edge off a bit. So I went 
around to the back door, and rang the bell there. 
Lots of fine places have back-door bells. 

Well, anyhow, I rang that door-bell and when a 
hired girl came to answer it, I told her why I was 
there, and she let me in. She led me through a lit¬ 
tle hall and then through a big one that opened 
into a front room large enough to hold a church 
meeting, if there’d been enough chairs. There 
weren’t, though. The furniture was nice but kind 
of frail and skimpy, and there wasn’t much of it 



Chapter Nineteen 


129 


There wasn’t even a center-table, and the rugs were 
all away too small for such a big floor. 

We went across that room and stopped before a 
door over in one corner. The woman rapped, and 
the crossest voice I’d ever heard yelled out, “Well, 
what do you want?” 



The door was locked 


“It’s Katie, Sir,” said the hired girl. 

“I know that, you old fool,” the voice answered. 
“I didn’t ask who you were. I asked what the deuce 
you wanted.” 

“There’s a boy here looking for work, Sir. He 
says there was an ad in the paper.” 























































130 


Me and Andy. 


“Well, why don’t you bring him in, instead of 
hanging around and chinning through the door like 
a galumping galoot?” cried the voice, angrier than 
ever. So Katie took hold of the door-knob and tried 
to get into the room, but the door was locked. 

“Take your time! Take your time, you old 
granny!” called out whoever was behind the door. 
“Can’t you even tell when a door is locked?” Then 
there was the sound of rubber tired wheels cross¬ 
ing the floor, and the door was unlocked and opened 
with a jerk. 

The man who opened it was in a wheel-chair. 
He had a face that was as cross as his voice, with 
sunk-in black eyes that seemed to look right through 
a fellow. His hair was long and black with gray 
in it, and it looked as though it never had been 
combed, while his teeth were so big and so white 
that they made me think of the old wolf in the 
fairy story. His arms and chest and shoulders 
were thick and strong, but his legs were as thin 
and as weak-looking as a very little boy’s. You 
could tell right away that he couldn’t use them. 
At first look, I thought he was an old man, but a 
second one told me that the lines in his face came 
from hurt and from being angry all the time. It 
made me feel both scared and sorry just to see him. 




CHAPTER TWENTY 


T HE room I went into was a crackajack. There 
were cases around the walls with books enough 
to last a fellow a most tremendous time, and on the 
floor were animal skins—one was a tiger’s and an¬ 
other a bear’s—that would have been wonderful to 
lie on when you read. I love to read and I can 
enjoy it much better when I lie on my stomach and 
let my heels knock together, but it’s awfully hard 
on the elbows when it’s done on a bare floor or an 
oil-cloth. 

There was a plenty of pictures in the room, too, 
some of them painted ones and some photographs. 
One of the photographs was of a boy about my size 
or a bit bigger and he was wearing a foot-ball suit 
and holding the ball under his arm. There was a 
good-natured smile on his face, and I didn’t blame 
him. I’d like to be photographed like that myself. 
It gave me a shivery kind of a start, though, when 
I noticed that the face of the boy in the picture was 
a lot like that of the crippled man in the wheel¬ 
chair. He saw that I’d noticed that and it seemed 
to make him angry again, for he yelled at me. 
“Well, if you’re through playing that you’re in 


131 


132_ Me and Andy 

a museum and gaping around, we’ll talk business. 
How old are you?” 

“Fourteen, Sir,” I answered him. 

“Can you work hard?” 

“Yes, Sir.” 

“Well, will you, if I give you a job?” 

“Yes, Sir.” 

“How many hours a day?” 

“From ten until four. I have to practice my 
music before Poppy’ll let me out.” 

“What do you mean by Poppy?” he yelled. “You 
talk like a bottle-baby. If you mean your father, 
say so.” 

“He’s not my father. Dad’s not living,” I an¬ 
swered as quietly as I could, though I was getting 
madder every minute. 

“Hump,” grunted the man. “Father dead, eh? 
He’s lucky.” Then he leaned forward and pointed 
his finger straight at me and almost yelled, “Do 
you steal?” 

I almost boiled over at that, I was so mad. “You 
can keep your darned old job,” I said. “You prob¬ 
ably wouldn’t pay me, anyhow,” and I stuck my 
cap on right in the house, and started for the door. 
Say; you never saw such a change in your life as 
came over that man then. He called me back and 
apologized to me and asked me to shake hands. 





Ancly sat in the bow, looking out over the ivater 






















Chapter Twenty 


133 


What he wanted done was to have the yard 
around the house cleaned up, and he wheeled him¬ 
self out on the porch, and watched me, while I 
started to work. There was plenty to do, because 
he had been gone for a couple of months, or more, 
and the grass had been allowed to grow so long you 
couldn’t push a mower through it, but had to cut it 
all with a sickle first. 

I was busy in that yard all the spare time I had 
for four days, before I got the grass whacked down 
with the sickle and a big pair of shears to where 
I could do anything with a lawn-mower. Even then 
it didn’t look any too good, because, when grass 
gets too long, it is sort of dead underneath. 

All the time I was working, Andy would lie un¬ 
der a tree and watch me. He was a great encour¬ 
agement to me, because the sickle handle made my 
hands so sore that I had to hold them under the 
hose-nozzle to cool the blisters. Then I’d rest a 
few minutes and visit with Andy. A good dog is 
always a comfort to a fellow. 

The fifth day was Saturday, and that day I had 
only to run the lawn-mower and smooth-up the job. 
It was so much easier than snagging off long grass 
with a sickle that I made the old mower hum, I can 
tell you. There was an awful lot of lawn, but in 
three hours I was all through and had the rake and 



134___Me mid Andy 

mower put away in the back room of the garage 
where they belonged. 

Then Mr. Barnes wheeled himself out the front 
door and had me let his chair down the steps, so 
that he could look at the job. He found fault every 
place he could and was so cross that Andy got sus¬ 
picious, and growled at him. He hadn’t noticed 
before that Andy was with me, and he hollered at 
him to get out, but of course Andy paid no atten¬ 
tion to him. Andy takes his orders from me. 

So Mr. Barnes said, “Here’s your money; now 
take your hound and get off my place,” and instead 
of the two or three dollars I expected, he handed me 
a single quarter. A quarter, mind you, for nearly 
twenty-five hours work. I’d had a lot of mean 
tricks played me, but that was the meanest. There 
was nothing I could do about it, though. I couldn’t 
sass a cripple or of set my dog on him. The tears 
came into my eyes a bit, I’m afraid, but I just held 
my head up and laid the quarter on his chair arm. 
I said, “I couldn’t think of charging for a charity 
job.” I’d a said that, if I was to be hanged for it. 

Then I started to turn away, but Mr. Barnes 
grabbed my arm, and I saw he was laughing. It 
was the first time I’d seen him do that. 

“Youngster,” he said, “before you start working 



Chapter Twenty 


135 


for strangers, always make a bargain with them. 
You’re sure to be cheated, if you don’t. I had 
an estimate of twenty dollars on this job, but it 
was too high. Sixteen strikes me as fair. How 
about it?” 

I tried to say that it was too much, but the only 
word that would come was “Gee!” Then he gave 
me the money, and I put it in my right hand hip- 
pocket, which was the only one that was in shape 
to be trusted, and started away again. 

But he called me back once more and asked me 
how I was fixed for sporting goods. First off, I 
didn’t know what he meant; then I recollected and 
told him I had a good yarn ball. So he laughed 
again, and had his hired girl fetch out a big box 
that was almost filled up with balls, and bats, and 
foot-ball things. They were all old, but mighty 
good. He told me to help myself, and I took a bat 
and a tennis racket. I’d have liked a lot more of 
the stuff, but I’m no hog. I think it kind of tickled 
Mr. Barnes, too, that I wasn’t, because he smiled at 
me and shook hands again. He told me to cut the 
grass every week; so that it wouldn’t get in any 
such condition again and said the price would be a 
dollar each time, which was mighty handsome, I 
think. 



136 


Me and Andy 


When I got to the corner, I glanced back and 
Mr. Barnes was still sitting there in his wheel 
chair, looking after me. I waved at him and then 
Andy and I turned the corner and went down the 
hill, rich as kings and a million times happier. 




CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 


M ONEY is mighty mean stuff in some ways. 

When you have none, you feel like a tramp, 
and every place you look, you see something you 
simply have to have, and can’t get; so you decide 
to earn some money right away. Then you get 
some kind of a job and work your head nearly off 
to get that money. 

Bye and bye, it’s pay-day and you feel fine when 
you get your cash. But does that feeling last? It 
does not. You’re perfectly miserable until you get 
that money spent. 

Oh, I admit that it’s fine to stand with your 
hands in your pockets and clink two half dollars 
together with each fist, leaning over a little, now 
and then, to make the new paper money in your 
hip-pocket crackle a bit. I like that fine and Andy 
seems to like it, too, for he’ll sit looking up at me 
with his head on one side, and giving a bark now 
and then. 

Yes, it’s very nice to crinkle and clink your 
money for a little while, but unless you’re a lot dif¬ 
ferent from me, it’s not going to take you very long 
to find yourself in front of a store, and then you’re 
a goner, because the outside of a store is only the 


137 


138 


Me <md Andy. 


thickness of an unlocked glass door from the inside, 
and an unlocked store door never stopped anybody. 
It’s not intended to stop them, either. So it was 
perfectly natural that, with sixteen dollars in my 
pocket and a little time on my hands, I took a walk 
along Adams Street, and looked in the windows at 
the clothes and things. 

The more I looked at new clothes, the shabbier 
my old ones seemed to me, which was no wonder, 
when I stopped to think about the fact that I had 
had them for eight months and had spent three 
weeks of that time tramping and sleeping in barns 
and hay-stacks. Besides, I had grown over three 
inches since I got the pants I was wearing, and I 
was twelve pounds heavier. 

“Well,” said I to myself, “it’s no disgrace to be 
shabby when you’re broke, but a fellow ought to 
be slicked up a bit when he has the price. So I laid 
aside a dollar for circus money, and went into a 
store to price suits. 

It didn’t take long to see that I’d had my last 
short-pants suit, which was a jolt to me in a way; 
not that I wasn’t glad to be growing up, but long- 
pants suits cost more money. Still, I could make 
it, I figured. 

But as soon as I tried on a pair of long pants 
and looked in the mirror, I knew I was done for, 



Chapter Twenty-one 


139 


because long pants and bare feet is a combina¬ 
tion that you just can’t get away with at all. 

So I thanked the salesman and said I guessed 
I’d wait a couple of weeks. 

He was a wizard, that salesman, for he guessed 



Long pants and bare feet is a combination you can’t 
get away with 


right off what was the matter, and made me wait 
while he figured a bit with me. He was the sort 
of man a fellow would just naturally loosen up 
and talk to, and in five minutes he had my story, 
and had worked out a scheme that fixed me up 
finely. Here is what I bought: 



























140 ___ Me and Andy 

1 Pair corduroy pants.$ 5.50 

(They were dandies too) 

2 Shirts (not blouses but reg¬ 
ular men’s work-shirts)... 2.00 

3 Pairs of socks. 1.00 

Garters.35 


2 Suits of summer underwear. 
I’d never worn any before, 
but the salesman said it was 


more respectable. 1.80 

1 Classy necktie.75 

1 Strong pair rubber-soled 

shoes . 3.00 

1 Trip to barber shop for a 
bath and a hair cut. 1.00 


$15.40 

Leaving me 50 cents for my circus ticket and a 
dime to go on until time to cut Mr. Barnes’ lawn 
again. 

Mr. Sprague, the salesman, did my things up in 
two packages, one for me to wear as soon as I’d 
had my bath, and the other with the extra things 
for me to carry along, and I went around the cor¬ 
ner to the barber shop. 

Andy was sure proud of me, and knew me right 
away as soon as I came out of the barber-shop 











Chapter Twenty-one 


141 


bath-room (a bath doesn’t make you smell any 
different to your dog), but I was afraid Poppy 
Vaughn would think me a stranger and not let me 
in. But, pshaw! Poppy never even noticed that 
I’d changed at all. That man certainly was incog. 


1 



■fib 



CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 

O NE thing I do better than most fellows is 
wondering. I can be sitting still thinking 
about nothing at all one minute, and the next I’ll 
have wonder-wandered myself half-way round the 
world. You might think that would be a hard 
thing to do, and I suppose it is for most folks, but 
for me it’s no trouble at all. I never bother to 
decide what I’ll wonder about, either. I just sit 
down and let the notions come to me. 

Sometimes, though, I don’t even sit down to won¬ 
der. I can do it just as well standing up or even 
Vvhile I’m walking along, but I couldn’t if it weren’t 
for Andy. He stays right alongside of me and 
keeps me from getting run over, or running into 
posts and things. 

Wondering was what I was doing one evening 
about two weeks after I got my new clothes. I’d 
cut Mr. Barnes’ grass again that day and had the 
dollar in my pocket. I was wondering whether, if 
there was another circus in town the next day, I’d 
spend the money to go to it. There was a lot to 
be thought on both sides of that question, but I 
had just about finished with it when I heard a lot 
of shouting and hollering and a man rushed by me, 


142 


Chapter Twmty-two 


148 


running as fast as he could. Of course, I thought 
he was going to a fire, or something of that sort, 
and followed him. There was a whole crowd going 
that way, but that man had a big start on every¬ 
body except me and Andy. He had only a little 
start on us. 

It was almost too warm a night to make it worth 
a fellow’s while to run his best; so I didn’t, but just 
loped along, keeping the man ahead in sight, which 
of course, let the crowd gain on me. Then I no¬ 
ticed for the first time what they were shouting. 
It wasn’t “fire” at all; it was “Stop thief!” 

As soon as I heard that, I started to run faster, 
thinking that, perhaps, Andy and I could pull down 
the thief ourselves; but the crowd had become con¬ 
fused about who was being chased and some of 
them had decided I was the one, for they yelled 
louder than ever and someone shot at me, the bul¬ 
let singing past my ear with a whining sort of 
noise that sounded mighty unpleasant. At that, 
I made up my mind that it was time for me to 
stop, and do any explaining I expected to live to 
do. So, I turned around and headed back towards 
the crowd. 

In half a minute, they were all around me, and, 
before you could say “Jack Robinson,” a policeman 
had put hand-cuffs on me, and Andy had bit him 



144 


Me and Andy 


in the leg. It was a right good bite, but the police¬ 
man was wearing heavy leather leggings and so 
didn’t get the full benefit of it, which was a lucky 
thing, as he’d probably have tried to shoot Andy 
on the spot. Before Andy could bite again, I or¬ 
dered him to lie down and he did, which also was 
lucky, both for him and the policeman, for even 
his gun might not have saved the policeman, once 
Andy got really started. 

Some of the crowd were in favor of handling me 
pretty roughly, but I wasn’t much worried about 
that, because the policeman stood them off. Besides, 
all I’d have had to do was to point at the people and 
say, “Sic ’em, Andy,” and they’d have scattered 
pronto, which is a word meaning anything faster 
than right away quick. But I was afraid Andy 
would get into trouble in spite of all I could do; 
so I said “Home, Andy! Go home. Go find Poppy,” 
and he went. He didn’t want to go, but I’d taught 
him to mind me, and, so, he had no choice, but to 
trot away, looking back at me every few feet. 

Then the policeman led me to the corner, where 
there was a patrol-box and called for the wagon, 
and in a few minutes, I was unloaded and marched 
into the police-station. There, the desk-sergeant 
asked me my name, and I answered before I stopped 



Chapter Twenty-two 


145 


to think and said. “Jim Vaughn, I mean Jack 
Bradford.” 

“Pretty young for the alias stuff, ain’t you, kid?” 
asked the sergeant, and I tried to explain, but he 
paid no attention to me. “Mug him in the morn¬ 
ing,” he said. “The Captain wants to see him 
now.” Then the policeman who had me jerked me 
around and shoved me through a door that was 
right next to the desk, and into another room, 
where there was a carpet on the floor and a flat 
desk with a glass top. 

There was a fine-looking old fellow sitting at the 
desk. He was dressed as a policeman, except that 
his uniform seemed to be a bit fancier, and his 
star wasn’t as big as the one that the man who 
had arrested me wore. He was writing and didn’t 
look up for a minute or so, though I think he knew 
we were there all the time. When he did look up 
he just glanced once at me. Then he roared: 

“Take those bracelets off that kid. Who do you 
think he is? Jack the Ripper or the Seven Suther¬ 
land Sisters?” 

“I, ’er I,” the policeman sort of stuttered, but he 
was quick enough to unlock the hand-cuffs and get 
them into his pocket, where they’d be out of sight. 

“Come over here, son,” said the captain, “and 



146 


Me and Andy 


tell me about yourself.” He was so kind to me that 
I was most ready to cry. Maybe I’d have done it, 
too, if I’d never had any worse troubles than being 
arrested for nothing at all, and if I hadn’t been too 
proud. As it was, I just stood by the captain’s 
desk and told him my real name, and why I was 
called Jim Vaughn and how I’d thought the man 
was running to a fire and had just followed him 
and how I’d been shot at and had been arrested 
and hand-cuffed. 

“Looks like a horse on you, Schmidt,” said the 
captain. “I don’t believe you have a thing on the 
kid. Has he been searched?” 

“No,” said the policeman, looking cheaper than 
ever. “Then,” said the captain, “search him and 
if you don’t turn up anything, let him go. It’s a 
good thing for you, your shot went wild.” So the 
policeman went through my pockets, but he didn’t 
find anything I was ashamed of except my hand¬ 
kerchief. That was pretty dirty, I admit. 

They were just about to turn me loose, when 
the door swung open again, and two more police¬ 
men came in with a prisoner held between them. 
He was a medium-sized man with one eye a little 
darker than the other, and one ear a bit larger and 
set lower than the other. I was so startled that 



Chapter Twenty-two 


147 


I nearly jumped out of my skin, for the prisoner 
was Mr. Brown, the caddy-master whose dog Andy 
had killed. 

He recognized me, too, in spite of my having 
grown so and having on long pants, and the cap¬ 
tain saw at once that we knew each other. He was 
a shrewd fellow, that captain. 

“What’s this fellow held for, Kowalski?” he 
asked, and one of the policemen answered, “He 
ran right into our arms and, seeing that he was 
all out of breath, we grabbed him. He tried to 
pull a gun; so we had to rough him up a little. 
Then we searched him to see if he had another 
gun and found his pockets full of jewelry. So we 
brought him in. The sergeant says you’ve got his 
partner in here. They threw a brick through a 
jeweler’s window and scooped up what they could 
at one grab.” 

“How about it, son?” asked the captain. “Did 
you ever see this man before?” 

“Yes sir,” I answered, “but I’ve never associated 
with him. He’s no friend of mine.” 

“That so, fellow?” the captain asked, turning to 
Mr. Brown, and then I got the surprise of my life. 

“We were both in on it,” said Mr. Brown. 

“Throw them both in, and go get this Poppy 



148 


Me and Andy 


Vaughn the kid talks about,” snapped the captain. 
“It’s Pontiac for yours, young man,” and in less 
than a minute I was locked up in a cell. They took 
my dollar and my pocket-knife away from me, too. 





L.man Wucr^l 







I said , “I wouldn't think of charging for a charity job” 










































































CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 

W ERE you ever locked up in a jail? It sounds 
horrid, and it’s really worse than it sounds; 
at least if all jails are like the one where I stayed 
that night. That was my only experience (except 
for the few minutes I had to wait for Dad to get 
me out the time Behnke had me arrested on account 
of his rabbits), but it was enough to convince me 
that between any two prisons in this world I’d 
choose neither. Worst of all, I hadn’t a friend in 
the world to come and get me out this time. The 
other time I’d known that I could count on Dad. 
A fellow certainly appreciates a family, when he 
hasn’t any, and needs one. 

Strictly speaking, a police station isn’t a jail at 
all, but it smells jaily enough to suit a fellow who 
isn’t more particular about such things than I am, 
and a cell is a cell wherever you find it. There are 
bars there to keep you in, but they don’t keep the 
drafts out. If you have your cell to yourself, you’re 
sure to be pretty lonely, and if you have company, 
it’s almost certain to be of a sort you would just 
as soon be without. 

I was lucky in that respect, however, for when 
my company came it was no stranger they pushed 


149 


150 


Me and Andy 


in there with me. It was poor old Poppy Vaughn, 
for it seems that being connected in any way with 
a fellow that’s in trouble means you’re in trouble 
too. I suppose it’s a police habit to gather in all the 
friends of a fellow they think is a crook. Prob¬ 
ably it’s necessary for the police to work that way, 
or they wouldn’t do so, but it’s most uncomfortably 
rough on innocent people who happen to get into 
trouble. It looks to me as though there ought to be 
some better way of catching crooks than just arrest¬ 
ing everyone in sight, and then sorting them over 
to pick out the ones you want. 

Poppy was just hopping mad when they brought 
him in, and he used a lot of words I’d never even 
known he knew. Some of them were corking good 
words too; such as minions, and myrmidons, and 
shackles. He also said he was going to take the mat¬ 
ter up with the president and with Lloyd George, 
and Mussolini, and was going to have the whole 
police force habeas corpused for treason de luxe. 

When Poppy said that, the lock-up keeper laughed 
so loudly that the old man got insulted and wouldn’t 
talk any more, but went over and sat on the bench, 
muttering away to himself at a great rate. But, 
after a little, he quit that too, and dropped off to 
sleep with his head on my shoulder. It seemed to 
me then that I felt good and bad all at the same 



Chapter Tvpnty-three 


151 


time; sort of sorry for Poppy because he was old 
and queer, but sort of glad, too, that there was 
someone who depended on me to comfort him when 
things went wrong. It was a swelled-up-in-the- 
throat kind of feeling that nobody could under¬ 
stand unless he’d had it. 

But you can’t keep on feeling that way, or any 
other way either, for such a very long time, for 
you’re pretty sure to drift off from feeling into 
thinking. That’s how it worked with me that night; 
I got to wondering why Mr. Brown, the caddy mas¬ 
ter, had claimed I was with him when he robbed 
that jeweler’s window. 

Offhand, it looked as though the answer to that 
question was because he quite naturally hated me 
and Andy on account on his bull-dog’s having been 
killed. But, when I thought longer about the mat¬ 
ter, I wasn’t so sure of that as I’d been at first, 
for I remembered that almost as soon as Mr. Brown 
had spoken, there had come into his eyes a queer 
look, as though he wished he hadn’t. 

“Perhaps,” I said to myself, “he was sorry for 
having thrown suspicion on me when I was inno¬ 
cent.” Somehow, though, that idea didn’t seem to 
fit in very well with what little I knew about Mr. 
Brown. So I went ahead thinking some more about 
the matter, only to get more puzzled the longer I 



152_ Me and Andy 

thought, until, finally, I gave it up as too hard 
a nut for me to crack. 

Then, of course, the idea that I’d been hunting 
for, hopped from nowhere into the middle of my 
mind. “Mr. Brown was sorry he’d admitted know¬ 
ing you,” said my mind to me. “He just blurted 
the first thing that came into his head, thinking 
he’d keep you from talking too much about him. 
Then he was sorry because he realized that it would 
have been better for him, if you’d been let go.” 

“Thank you, Mind,” said I to myself. “You’re 
quite a friend of mine, when you decide to be use¬ 
ful. But, why was Mr. Brown afraid of having 
folks know who he was? Was it because he was 
ashamed of being arrested, or because he’d been 
doing something even worse than robbing jeweler’s 
windows, and so couldn’t afford to be recognized?” 

When that thought came to me, I was so much 
excited that I forgot all about Poppy, and jumped 
to my feet so fast that the poor old fellow’s head 
slid off my shoulder and bounced hard against the 
wall. Poppy was so tired, though, that he didn’t 
even wake up; he just grunted a bit and went on 
snoring at a great rate. Once in a while his false 
teeth would come loose from the top of his mouth 
and drop down on his real ones, but Poppy just 
gave them a flip with his tongue to throw them 




Chapter Twenty-three 


153 


back into place, and went right ahead without wak¬ 
ing up or even missing a snore. He was right 
clever at it, and, worried as I was, I had to stop 
to admire him. 

All that wasn’t getting us out of jail, though, 
and as I couldn’t seem to plan anything that would 
work, I just gave it up and went to sleep too. 


M 




CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 


B Y THE time I waked up, dawn was begin¬ 
ning to come, as I could tell even there inside 
the jail, for the electric globe in the corridor was 
dimmed by a thin, grayish light that sneaked in 
through the bars of a little window high up in the 
wall. I shivered a little, for it was damp in there, 
and I hadn’t had enough sleep. I felt sort of angry 
at Poppy, too, for having got me into such a mess 
of trouble by being so helpless that I just naturally 
had to stay around and take care of him, instead 
of being on my way weeks before, as I should 
have been. 

Anyhow, it was morning, and that always helps 
some, no matter how bad the night has been. I don’t 
know why it is so, but I do know that I always 
expect today to be better than yesterday, whether 
or not there is any reason for such a hope. I don’t 
know why I am that way, but I’m glad of it, for 
it’s a nice way to be. Besides, there’s always break¬ 
fast. 

Jail breakfasts are nothing to brag about; black 
coffee, dry bread, and oatmeal without either sugar 
or cream. I’d rather be loose, without anything to 
eat, than locked in, with a mean breakfast, but then 


164 


Chapter Twenty-fow 


155 


so would almost anyone else. All the same, I ate 
mine and so did Poppy. 

A while after breakfast, the lock-up keeper came 
to the door of our cell, bringing another man with 
him. The lock-up keeper told us that the other 
man was a friend of his, and was a lawyer. Then 
he let the lawyer in with us, without waiting to 
see whether we wanted him or not. 

Now, as a general rule, I like almost everybody, 
but I didn’t have to look twice at that lawyer to 
know that he was the sort of man Andy growls at. 
So I decided not to have anything to do with him 
and told him so at once. 

Did he leave there on learning that I didn’t want 
him? He did not. He just planted himself on our 
bench and began a long-winded how-do-you-do about 
how terrible it was that such a nice old man and so 
fine a boy should be locked up for nothing at all. 

“It’s a good thing that I happened to hear about 
the case,” he went on. 

“Why?” said I. 

“So I could get you out of here,” he answered. 

“Oh! are we leaving here now?” I asked him, 
thinking I could fluster him. 

But I might as well have tried to rattle a plush 
cushion as that lawyer. I couldn’t fluster him and 
I couldn’t make him angry, try as hard as I could. 



156 


Me and Andy 


He just refused to be offended, and kept on about 
his friendship for us and it was only until I finally 
mentioned the fact that I hadn’t any money, and 
Poppy, who wasn’t as foolish in some ways as he 
was in others, admitted that he had some but was 
going to keep it that that lawyer decided to leave. 
He was that kind of lawyer. 

But after he had gone away, I began to wonder 
whether, perhaps, it might not have been a good 
idea to let the lock-up keeper’s lawyer friend see 
what he could do about getting us out. I was 
almost, but not quite, ready to call him back. 

It was a good thing, though, that I didn’t do that, 
for in a very few minutes the lock-up keeper came 
back again and said, “Your name Jim Vaughn?” 
and not wanting him to think I was trying to be 
smart, I answered, “Yes, Sir,” instead of “That’s 
what they call me.” 

“There’s a friend of yours here to see you, and 
he can’t very well come in; so I’m taking you out 
to him. Mind you, though, no tricks! If you try 
to make a run for it, you’ll wish you hadn’t; that 
is, of course, provided, you’re that lucky.” 

So I said, “Yes Sir” and “No Sir” in what I 
judged to be the right places, and followed him out 
of the cell room and out of the police-station. 

For just a minute, I stopped on the police-station 



Chapter Twenty-four 


157 

steps and took a long breath. Street air tasted bet¬ 
ter than it ever had before, and the sunlight was 
pleasanter than I’d ever known it to be. Even the 
sparrows quarreling there in the gutter seemed like 
old friends to me that morning, for it was wonder- 



I stopped, on the police-station steps and took a long 
breath 


ful to be out of jail, even if only for a moment. 
That may seem pretty far fetched, considering that 
I’d been locked up only one night, but you see I’d 
never spent all night in jail before, and so wasn’t 
used to it. 

How long I’d have stood there dreaming, I can’t 










































158 


Me and Andy 


say, but the lock-up keeper jarred me awake by 
pushing me towards a large, shiny automobile, 
parked near by. 

The chauffeur looked at me very suspiciously, but 
he opened the door for me and the lock-up keeper 
got in with me. There I found myself sitting be¬ 
tween Mr. Barnes and the lock-up keeper. I don’t 
know when I’d been so glad to see anybody as I 
was to see Mr. Barnes then, and yet I’d never even 
thought of him while I was locked up. 



CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 


I T WAS plain that Mr. Barnes was a pretty 
important man, for all that he was a cripple, 
for the lock-up man took his word that he’d be 
responsible for my not running away. So the 
lock-up keeper went and leaned against the police- 
station wall. 

As soon as we were alone in the car, Mr. Barnes, 
roaring at me in a terrible voice, said, “What’s the 
matter with you, anyhow? This is a fine mess 
you’ve got yourself into, hanging around with 
thieves and throwing bricks through jewelers’ win¬ 
dows. If you needed money, why didn’t you come 
to me?” 

He yelled at me so loudly, and with so fierce a 
look in his eye, that I knew right away that he was 
interested in me and wanted to be my friend. Peo¬ 
ple like Mr. Barnes always save their bad tempers 
for folks they like well enough to help, I’ve noticed. 

So, I just kept cool and told him my story and 
he sat there and listened without interrupting me 
at all, until I got to Mr. Brown’s saying I was his 
partner in robbing that window. 

“Brown,” said he. “What Brown?” 


159 


160 _ Me and Andy 

“Why,” I answered, “the one who was arrested 
and who said I was with him.” 

“See here, young man,” he snapped. “Don’t you 
try any shenanigan on me. You call this man by 
a different name from the one he gives himself; 
yet, you claim, never to have set eyes on him be¬ 
fore. Your story doesn’t hang together.” 

Well, I was inclined to be angry at him for doubt¬ 
ing my word, and should have walked back to my 
cell without listening any more, but I know that 
Mr. Barnes was really friendly to me or he wouldn’t 
have come at all. So I answered him quietly enough. 

“I never said I’d never seen him before. I only 
said that I wasn’t with him last night. And the 
reason I called him Mr. Brown was that that was 
the name he went by at the golf club near Chicago 
where my dog killed his. He was caddy-master 
th,ere.” 

“What Club was it?” he asked, and I happening 
to remember the name, told him, “The Rivermere.” 

“Son,” asked Mr. Barnes in a queer sort of voice, 
“when did you last read a newspaper?” I had 
to own up that it was almost two weeks. I was 
ashamed of my ignorance, but it was the truth and 
I had to out with it. 

“Jim, you hurry right in and tell the captain I 
want to see him out here at my car. Tell him it’s 



Chapter Twenty-five 


161 


mighty important. Skip now, and don’t let any 
grass grow under your feet. No, come back here. 
Sergeant, you go!” he yelled out of the car window. 
I’d never seen Mr. Barnes so much interested in 
anything before. But I realized then that he must 
have had even more money than I’d thought, or he 
couldn’t have sent for a police-captain as though 
he were a telegraph boy. I wondered whether the 
captain would really come. 

I needn’t have worried though, for in about three 
minutes the sergeant came back out of the station 
and the captain with him. They came over to the 
car and the sergeant held the door open for the 
captain to climb in with us. Evidently, he knew 
Mr. Barnes, for he called him Frank and told him 
it was good to see him again. “What can I do for 
you, Frank?” he asked. 

“Well, in the first place,” answered Mr. Barnes, 
“you can turn my young friend here, and his old 
friend, Poppy Vaughn, loose.” 

“Glad to do so, Frank,” said the captain, “since 
Brown has just admitted that he’s wanted for mur¬ 
der in Chicago, and that the boy was not with 
him at all last night. What’s the second thing you 
want?” 

Mr. Barnes rubbed his chin with his hand and 
looked a bit sheepish. “Well, I guess you’ve stolen 



162 


Me and Andy 


my thunder,” he said. “I was going to claim the 
reward on Brown for the boy, but since Brown has 
already confessed, I’m afraid we’re too late. The 
youngster could have used that thousand very 
nicely, too.” 

That just goes to show you that a mean man can 
be mean all over. That man Brown hadn’t been sat¬ 
isfied with nearly killing Andy, and with getting 
me and Poppy locked up all night. He had to cheat 
me out of a thousand dollars and let it go to a per¬ 
fect stranger. I get mad every time I think about 
him, and I think he deserves every day of the thirty 
years he’s been sentenced to prison. 




CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 


B EING arrested is a very annoying thing, and 
it’s bad for your reputation, too, but it can 
do you a great deal of good in some ways. At 
least, my being arrested for a robbery I had noth¬ 
ing to do with worked out that way. 

In the first place, I became more than ever de¬ 
termined to behave myself, so that if I ever was 
arrested again I’d be innocent and could be let go. 
A fellow’s a fool, if he doesn’t learn something from 
his troubles, even when he’s not to blame for them. 

In the second place, I learned to appreciate Andy 
more than ever before. It was the first time that 
we’d ever been separated all night since he was a 
sprawly puppy, and we’d missed each other most 
tremendously. He almost knocked me down, he 
was so glad to see me when Poppy and I climbed 
out of Mr. Barnes’ car at the old violin shop. I’d 
been worried almost sick for fear he’d be hungry 
but I needn’t have been, for George Zeller and the 
Pahlman boys had fed him for me. They’re all 
mighty fine boys, and I’d do as much for them any 
time. 

Those things would have been almost enough to 
pay me for all I’d been through, but they weren’t 


163 


164 


Me and Andy 


the half of what happened to me, because Mr. 
Brown’s being caught got the whole story into 
every paper in the country and my picture was 
printed and so were Andy’s and Poppy’s. I got 
letters from everywhere and one of them was from 
a man in a town down in Missouri. 

The letter said that my grandfather had died a 
year before my father did and had left a thousand 
dollars to each of his twelve grand-children. I was 
to get mine if I was ever found, but not unless I 
went to college. That part will be easy, for I’m 
going to study very hard. Then if anything else 
ever happens to me and I write a book about it, 
there won’t be as many mistakes as there are in 
this one. There wasn’t any sense in my going on 
to Missouri, and Poppy’s sister had turned up to 
take care of him, as a result of reading about us; 
so there was no reason why I shouldn’t accept Mr. 
Barnes’ invitation to come and live at his house 
and be his boy. I call him Uncle Frank and he 
calls me Jim-Jack. But Poppy calls me Jim and 
still thinks I’m his lost son. I go to see him almost 
every day and always get scolded for having been 
out so long. 

Andy sleeps under a grand piano now, but it 
hasn’t spoiled him in the least. Andy’s a mighty 
fine dog. 






































































* 














































































































